The month in computer repair hell (Score 1)

I bought a new machine for the family, an HP. It had problems shortly after I set it up. There was a problem with the hard disk. I had not burned the 8 recovery CDs so I had to wait for new ones to arrive from HP. Things ran ok for awhile, then the crapped out again. I tried the recovery CDs but they did not work. I spent two hours with HP tech support trying them again, until the tech decided it was a hardware problem. It was then another wait for the new hard disk to arrive.

Meanwhile back at the ranch I had ordered DSL from Verizon. I set it up and discovered that it crapped out every evening. It worked great during the day and after midnight, but from about 5:00 PM until midnight it would slow down to a crawl. It did not disconnect. I could ping various sites and do DNS lookups but almost no data flowed. Four nights in a row I am on phone with Verizon tech support. They were very polite, but basically I just went through power cycling the modems and taking my router out of the loop and running straight from on computer, until things improved. On the fourth night, I was told that I was too far from the office and that was the problem. I put up with the performance for about a month until cable became available.

Go to each computer and change the smtp settings for each email account to point to Verizon. On Linux I only had to change postfix's smart relay host.

During the DSL debacle I decided that DSL worked best when connected to a phone jeck in the basement away from all of my computers. I could not use my original plan of having my linux box use a wired coonnection to the router, and I had switch to wireless. I went out a shopped around the cheapest 802.11b device was a Netgear MA120. I was not sure it would work on linux but I figured I would swaped the Linksys WUSB11 that was on my daughter's Win98 box. I had it working on linux before. In the process of removing the WUSB11 and adding the MA120, I screwed up the networking completely on the Win 98 box. Windows thought the WUSB11 was still there. No matter how much I tried to uninstall devices and the netork software, I would get it to talk to the MA120. I ended up reformatting and reinstalling Win98 on that box.

My linux box is still not setting up the WUSB11 correctly on boot. I had originally gotten to work without WEP, when I was on dial up. I figured no one would want to leach my wonderfull dial up service. When I turned WEP on, it would try to associate before it was configured and would fail. I ended up modifying the source of the driver to hardcode the WEP key. Yeah for open source. It now hotplugs correctly, but I am still having problems getting it to configure correctly at boot. I have not had the time to get deeper into.

The cable modem arrived and I set it up with a phone call to tech support. I then tried to put the router in so I could share the set up. I had to clone the MAC to get it to work. It then crapped out about 30 minutes laters. Oh crap. It turned out to be a bad cable between the cable modem and the router.

Go to each computer and change smtp to Adelphia for each email account again.

Things have been relatively good since then, but I have long list. I need a real backup strategy. I now have four machines that should be backed up. I have lots of music and lots of photos stored on the computers now and the failure of the HP drive has me worried. I have sharing working between two machines. I never got the SIMS to reinstall on my daughter's computer.