Disconnect

Connecting Mister's new desktop to my network was not as simple as it first appeared.

It connected. And then it stopped. I fiddled and it connected. I did this several times. Yesterday, after what I hoped was my final and successful troubleshooting, it failed completely. All efforts to download drivers and update adapter software to get it to work with Windows 7 failed. His computer tells me it is connected to my home network, but my network map tells me it is not connected. Oh, and his computer tells me that despite the part of the window that says he is connected to my home network he has no Internet access.

I repeatedly tried to add him to my home network map, dutifully moving a flash drive from my computer to his, and telling his computer to link to my network. No go.

Luckily, all my fiddling didn't mess up my home network as this post is proof (using my laptop connected to the wireless home network). I appear to have a link from Mister's desktop at some level--his computer both tells me he is connected with strong strength and it clearly accepts the code from the router. But there is only intermittent Internet access, with none at all since yesterday afternoon.

I think I have to accept that the Cisco router does not work with the Cisco wireless adapter. To be fair, it wasn't built to work with anything later than Windows Vista, but still. Cisco did have instructions to make it work on Windows 7, but nothing worked. Some instructions were unhelpfully vague, so I just tried stuff--hence my worry that I screwed up my network in the process.

Oh well. I'll wait a couple days to see if the email I sent to Cisco returns anything of use other than a link to their pages that I already exhausted. After that, I'm off to a store to buy a new adapter that claims it works with Windows 7 right out of the box.

I hereby retract my wish that all my tech issues would be as easy as connecting the new computer to the Internet. On the bright side, I at least have time to work on this problem!