August 24, 2012
Dear Everyone:
You know that smell you get when something
electrical is overheating?
Last Friday evening I smelled that smell, but
couldn’t place it. Checked
the refrigerator. Checked
the laundry closet. Not the
toaster. Couldn’t find the
problem.
By Saturday morning, it was gone.
So I figured it wasn’t anything to worry about.
Then I decided to check my
email.
The computer couldn’t find the webpage.
In fact, after a few minutes I determined that the computer
couldn’t find any web pages.
At first, I suspected the
wireless router.
After all, I’d had it since before I moved into my current abode.
So I unplugged it, let it “cool down”, then plugged it back in.
Looks fine.
Computer still couldn’t find the
Internet.
Checked the
modem.
A few weeks ago, my entire
cable service, including the Internet,
had gone down for a brief time.
But both TVs were fine.
And the “Internet light” on the modem was OK.
Then I decided to take a look at my
Nook eBook,
which has wireless capability and is even hooked into my home network.
Nook had no problem seeing the Internet.
Dragged out a very old laptop, the one that
crashed three days after Christmas, 2009.
It only works in “Safe Mode”, but it still has an Internet
connection. And it did,
indeed, see the Internet.
For those of you playing along at home, this is
called a “Root Cause Analysis”, or RCA.
This is where, instead of treating the symptom (can’t find the
Internet), you look for the underlying problem.
And there it was: The
tiny gadget inside the laptop that sends and receives
wireless signals
wasn’t working.
In fact, that was probably what I smelled Friday
night: The tiny gadget
giving up the ghost.
RIP,
tiny gadget.
So my laptop still worked, except no Internet
connection.
Unacceptable, of course.
On Sunday, I went to the Really Big Blue
Electronics Warehouse Store and picked out a new laptop, making sure
that it had a CD drive. A
lot of the newer models are so much lighter in weight because the
manufacturers decided that a CD drive was “optional”.
You know what’s coming:
Fun-filled hours of trying to load software, copy “important”
documents, etc. from the “old” (2009) laptop to the new one.
Switching from one computer to the other whenever I needed to
access The World In General.
Hrrmphfff!!!
Tuesday evening I was using my
hair dryer when it
suddenly went
Snap! Crackle!
POP!!!
And smoke (real smoke) started coming out of the
nozzle.
Clearly, not a good week for electronic devices.
Fortunately, I had another hair dryer in the
suitcase, which is still lying on the floor in the second bedroom from
our trip to New York last month.
I hadn’t got around to putting it back into the closet where it
belongs. Sometimes
procrastination is a virtue.
Still to come:
Shop for a new hair dryer.
Continue installing applications that I had on the “old” laptop
onto the new laptop. And so
on.
Actually, I like the new laptop very much.
I think we’re going to get along famously, at least for a couple
of years.
Love, as always,
Pete
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