Maintaining the Connections

My own civil war in my home with computers and connectivity--wireless and wired--continues.

In a success, I replace by old cordless phone that turned out to operate on the frequency of my wireless router. Mister's computer and the Wii would experience interruptions whenever it was picked up. I could have checked to see if I could switch frequencies on it--I thought I had that option, anyway--but it also had poor quality for soft voices so I got a new phone. The Vtech cordless I bought was both on sale and had comments from a buyer who said it didn't interfere with his home wireless. It also has a remote station so for the first time I have a phone in my own bedroom (other than leaving my cell there, of course). The new phones do not interfere with my router signal. I may put the demoted phone in Mister's room since he has a phone jack there.

Now I just need to finally put in the phone/fax that I bought some months ago. It was dirt cheap, although I don't know when I'll need a fax in this day and age.

Oh, and after buying a printer cable to adapt to a sixteen pin connection on the printer to hook it up to Mister's new computer, I had to surrender. The disk with the printer could not be used to add the printer software to the new computer. Strangely, the disk did not have anything in English on it. I did manage to go online to download software for the printer but even after "successfully" installing the printer with that success, it would not print--error messages kept stopping a print job.

So I'll take the printer to join the old computer that went with the printer that I took to my Ex's house so the kids can use both there. I did find a nice printer/scanner/copier on sale that I bought to put my son back in the printing business. It didn't come with a printer cable and the one I bought for a 16-pin connection is obviously useless. I have that cable and need to hook up the new device. Heck, I'll use it, too. Scanning and copying? That will be useful even if I have to move stuff to use the printer with a flash drive. Then I need to build a small platform to hold the printer since the printer stand on Mister's computer desk is too narrow to hold the thing. Some wood and bolts should do the trick.

I won't even discuss the long record of failure I've experienced trying to use a game I was playtesting for a friend ever since I moved beyond an XP machine.

The long technology wars continue. We still just don't have true plug and play yet, do we?