You probably thought I was dead

No, you are not reading a ghost’s blog. It is really me. Are you ready for a long story? What kind of story you ask? A tragedy, one that would make Shakespeare proud. A story about love lost and death…Ok, well, maybe not quite like Shakespeare.

I spent part of the day downloading automatic updates for my computer on New Year’s Day. Everything installed correctly and I shut the computer down for the night. The next morning I went to boot up my computer and it got to where Windows starts up and says there is an error and freezes every time I tried to go into safe mode or tried to start normally. I frantically called my computer guru of a brother trying to figure out what was wrong with my baby. (See, my love is lost.) We tried a bunch of things but nothing worked and he suggested that I pull out the hard drive and connect it by a cable to another working computer (as a secondary hard drive) to try to run check disk on it to figure out what’s going on.

I was so upset because my DSL was supposed to be installed by AT&T the next day and I was SO close to having fast internet after I have used AOL dial-up for the last several years. I tried a few of my brother’s other suggestions over the next few days, but nothing worked.

The DSL was installed on Tuesday the 2nd, but the installation kit didn’t come in the mail until Wednesday. I very eagerly set up and installed the modem/router on my ancient laptop and tried to connect to the internet from there, but silence. Nothing happened. I worked for three HOURS trying to get it to work. I didn’t call my brother because I had bugged him every day since my computer went down and I wanted to give him a day off from fixing all my computer issues. I broke down the next day and called him and we worked on it together for another three HOURS. The internet still didn’t work so I called AT&T the next day and talked to their tech support. The woman was really nice but she wasn’t able to fix it with me on the phone. We set up an afternoon for a technician to come back out to the house.

I decided to take the following Tuesday afternoon off so I could be there to babysit the technician to make sure that the internet really worked before they left. Fortunate and unfortunately I was sick that weekend through Tuesday, so I was home anyway. The service appointment was set up for 12 to 4 p.m. The technician was lucky that I decided to get up fairly early even though I was sick to be ready. As it was, he came at 10 a.m. and I didn’t have the dog penned up. But that’s what he gets for coming two hours early.

The technician found that the DSL was hooked up to the house correctly, but it was connected to a random single jack. There would be no way to figure out which jack without trying EACH and EVERY jack. Which is so stupid. It had been a week since I was supposed to have service so I just wanted it done. The technician rewired the jack in my room and we hooked up the modem/router and we were getting a signal, but my modem kept on dropping the connection.

Down to Best Buy I drove and returned the modem/router and got a separate modem and router instead of an all-in-one combo. Hooked up the modem and wham. Fast internet! Now that I have fast internet, my poor laptop is struggling to do all the updates that it missed out on during the past three years.

Now that I have the internet problem fixed, I can focus on fixing my poor desktop. I’ve had three dog/house sitting jobs this week so I haven’t been home but for a few hours since the DSL was fixed.

For now, I will use my laptop and then try to work on the desktop computer with my brother sometime this week. I’m just hoping that it’s an easy or inexpensive fix. Until it is fixed, all my programs and photo-editing software is out of commission.