I'm back on the air again. My laptop, a Dell Latitude, has been great, I'm very happy with it, but when I came home from Denver last month...I couldn't connect to my home network. The damned thing saw my network, gave me reports on how strong the signal was, but refused to even try to connect to it. It was driving me nuts, and meant that I was banished to The Hole, my office in the basement with my main desktop (which holds my backup drives, all my writing from...ever, my pictures, all that jazz). Not all that bad, but I like to see the sun sometimes, or even the rain. I couldn't get anywhere fiddling with it, checking the 'Net for answers, all that jazz.So I finally called my sister-in-law, Joan Childs. Well...actually, Joan is my brother-in-law Carl's wife; is she still my sister-in-law? No matter, she's a freelance computer consultant and probably the brightest bulb in the whole family. She's a sweetheart, too, and just dove right into the problem. And after three downloads, and a lot of "No, I tried that" and "Holy crap, I can connect to the neighbor's Linksys network but not my own!", she got me hooked up. Turned out there had been a Dell upgrade in the driver for my WLAN card to handle a Windows upgrade that dealt with the security layer on top of TCP/IP. She sent me a link, I downloaded it, and I was writing this post within five minutes. Thanks, Joan!
