Tonight we dropped by Jennifer’s parents’ house to pick up a receipt for a gift that needs exchanging. As soon as I walked in the door, both of her parents and her brother started talking to me about a computer problem they were having. They couldn’t get internet access, and apparently after a long time on the phone with Qwest/MSN, the problem was determined to be a bad CAT5 cable. They went out and had purchased two new cables but things still weren’t working.
Their setup is such:
- DSL connection
- DSL router
- Wireless router
- One iMac that connects via CAT5
- One laptop (currently dead) that connects via wireless
When I arrived, they had the DSL router connected directly to the iMac and things were working. We tried three different cables, and everything still worked. At that point I ruled out a bad cable. I then plugged the DSL router into the wireless router, and ran a cable from the wireless router to the iMac. There was an error light on the wireless router, so I reset it using the power-off, power-on method.
Everything came back up and works. Perhaps the wireless router error was the problem, but they swear they’d power cycled it already.
Perhaps I just have that magic touch.
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