Monday, May 9, 2011

Sitting in a pink hotel, talking to tech support to connect a Windows 98 laptop to a LAN

Yes, that actually was kind of fun.
   It's a Best Western Hotel, and yes, it is pink. It's a very nice hotel full of nice people. This old laptop has an ethernet adapter. The hotel has free high-speed internet. I don't know beans about ethernet adapters and only barely know that LAN stands for Local Area Network. Couldn't get the thing to connect and had to call the tech support people hired by the hotel so the hotel people don't have to guess what I'm doing.
  The tech person was great when she called. The funny part was that although she didn't run screaming from her room when I told her I was running Windows 98...her system crashed 3 times while she tried to get it to run Windows 98.  There's a certain perverse joy I won't attempt to explain in having the tech person say "Hang on a second, my system locked up."
  We figured it out eventually. She had me go to a DOS prompt. That, by the way, is a sure sign I'm a computer "old timer". That I not only knew what a DOS prompt is, let alone that I'm well-versed in using one, prevented either of us from giving up.
   She tried to give me all the credit when we were able to solve the problem from a black screen with a plain old C:\ and a little blinkie. That's DOS for you. Plain screen, capital "C" a colon, a slash, and your fingers type a command. Fact is, it was one of those team effort things. She knows LANs and I know DOS.
   So here we are.
   But what I REALLY like is that now I can write a chapter or two in Sexton Sand before I go to bed.

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