Sunday, March 30, 2008

The Most Amazing Thing Happened...

I was surfing around on Saturday, drinking my Diet Coke w/lime, watching the "Godfather" marathon on AMC, and basically just lounging around. As I have mentioned on occasion around here, I haven't been terribly thrilled with my ISP. For a couple of months I've had "issues" with my internet cutting out, or being redirected to search sites if things were taking too long. I call up my ISP, and I get the same response. Try the 3Rs: Restart your modem. Restart your router. Reboot your computer. Things look fine from here. Surprisingly, they actually sent a real person out the last time, who fixed a couple of things, but obviously hadn't taken care of my problems.

Yesterday got to be quite frustrating. I must have gone through the 3Rs at least a half dozen times throughout the morning and afternoon. Finally, I call my ISP (they're on speed dial on my cell phone). I got a fairly pleasant sounding woman (after the 5 minutes of "push 1", "push 2", etc.), who seemed to know what the hell she was talking about. We did the whole 3Rs thing, and I still couldn't even get onto the internet. And that's when she told me that her computer had been talking with my modem the entire time. So, by process of elimination, we determined that the router was where my problem existed. Damn. I thanked her, and she wished me a good afternoon, and I was left on my own.

I was all ready to head to Staples (because we don't have any big electronics/computer store anywhere nearby) to buy a new router. That I can't afford. But I thought I'd try one last thing. My last resort would be to reset the router to its factory specs. If I could figure out how. I was able to finally get back online, and surprisingly, I found some support on its website (even though it's a discontinued router), and I was able to get in to reset administrative passwords, and reset the clock, and sort of go through all of my options to see where things were set at.

OMG. It's like I opened up my router and shook out all the extra "0"s and "1"s that had built up inside. Like digital dust bunnies clogging up the nooks and crannies. Probably from all those HNTs. Since resetting everything, I haven't had a single instance of problems, and the speed at which pages are loading is obviously faster than it was before. Hopefully this was all that I needed to solve my problems. I'm sure you'll hear about it if it wasn't!

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