I’m taking a break from my weekly ramblings about all things tech and geeky to lament about the horrible technology-less week at the Dye household.
We pick up with Friday, April 8…
I haven’t mentioned my Lenovo laptop (which I use both for work and leisure). A few weeks ago, I noticed that every time it went to sleep and I went to wake it up, it had blue screened and asked me if I wanted to start up in safe mode. So that was going on too, but it doesn’t really impede productivity like being off-line. My IT friend is looking into this. I’m just adding it to the dysfunctional list of gadgets I have.
Then also on Friday, I noticed my work station computer was not finding the newly named wireless network we did that morning. It was still looking for the old network. Sigh – what else was going to happen? I tell how I solved this problem below in the…
Lessons Learned Section
Try not to give human characteristics to your computer and other electronics. They can not reason, they just do what they’re built to do. Here’s my pathetic little story to illustrate: When our router started cycling off, we switched it out for a newer one, but we were still having problems with outages. I made and named (more than one new network) and had my desktop workstation (wireless), connected to it. When we were on the third network, my work station would not find the new network name – even after rebooting.
I felt that perhaps it was in a time warp and confused (there’s the human characteristic thing). In reality, I was the confused one and Tim, my IT friend had already shown me how to remove old or unneeded wireless networks earlier that day, but for some reason, I felt I didn’t need to try that. But when I did it, then it found the newest network and wa-la, we were connected.
Tech Tip: Here are the steps to remove old networks you connected to while traveling, or at a remote office. (for Windows 7): Control Panel>Network & Sharing Center>Manage Wireless Connections – then look at the list of wireless networks and if you don’t need some of them, highlight one and click ‘remove’. It’s gone!
Try to keep your patience with gadgets – they really aren’t out to get you and the result is not thinking clearly and rationally. Take a sanity break.
Call tech support, if it’s available to you. If you have a small business, you should definitely have an IT pro on your team.
Keep your equipment patched, updated and clean by doing regular disk cleanups, running security scans and make sure your anti-virus program is automatically updating, removing temp files and keeping your file system in order.
My husband, Doug and I hope we don’t see another week like this one for a long time! Now that I’ve put the story down, we can refer back to it for tips if our memory fades here and there (as it will).