Post 1004 - The Yearly Rant

I had to get my internet connection fixed today. I did, after a fashion, but I'm still not overly satisified.

You may remember that I had severe connectivity issues up to this morning. Downloads were sluggish; I might get 100kb/second. Just trying loading youtube and playing something.

Buddy came and did some stuff and told me that I should be up to 2.5mb/s. It was fine for the afternoon. Tonight, however, the connection is slow again, to the point where I might get 200kb/s. An improvement, sure, but not nearly enough to make it convenient. Youtube videos, my benchmark for success, mostly run fine but pause from time to time. Better, but still not good.

And the asus eee pc. My gosh, I have never been more frustrated by a piece of electronics in my entire life. I gave up on linux recently and put xp on it and replaced the on-board 512mb of ram with 2g. After buddy left today, I was able to view videos on the asus again, but once again, it slowed down throughout the day. I removed open office before supper. Still runs slowly, taking 30 or 40 seconds just to show me the options available to me in the control panel. I added virtual memory. Took it away. Added it back. No dice, but I was able to view a youtube video just before I had supper. Took the computer upstairs to charge the battery (I get maybe 90 minutes on a charge), and hauled it out after my shepherd's pie.

This is where the real fun began.

Keep in mind: I have little confidence in this machine. It has become more and more crappy every time I start it up, but until this evening, until 90 minutes ago, I was at least able to connect, slowly, painfully, pathetically, to the internet wirelessly.

Not any more.

Somehow, the wireless network adaptor has stopped working. It is enabled, but not connected, whatever the heck that means. Any attempt to repair the connection leads to failure. I can still stick a piece of cat 5 cable in it and it will work, but it is still a lot slower than it should be.

I wish I could tell you what the problem was. I could spend hours scouring google and finding some clues that would lead to a solution. Or, I could throw the computer on my drive way and drive my car over it 76 times.

Guess which one I'd rather do?

I know that life is short. Things like this shouldn't get to me. If inferior internet service and a crappy netbook computer are the only things in my life I have to worry about, I don't have much to worry about. But it is these little bugaboos, these pet peeves, that drive a person the craziest. We can't do much about family members we may not like. If you're in a job you don't like, in this economy, then you pretty much have to grin in and bear it (I like my job!). But we expect things like new computers and internet connections to work all the time. When they don't, well, it is disappointing.

Grrr!!

Bevboy