Marshall Brain's Blog

---

Computer Repair #19

[This post is part of an ongoing series of posts in December cataloging how much time I spend repairing the computers here in the Brain household.]

This morning Leigh was up early and the network connection on her machine was dead -- no browsing, no email. I looked at the dialog for her wireless card and it seemed to be OK. I asked her if she had rebooted her machine recently and she had not, so we tried that and it did not help.

I went downstairs and tried my machine and it was having the same problem. I looked at both the cable modem and the Linksys router/hub. Both looked OK -- all the lights were on as expected and flashing in a way that seemed appropriate. [How primitive is that? There is nothing sophisticated about "The lights seem to be flashing OK", but that is the only external signal available.]

There's not really much to do except to reset the cable modem and the router and cross your fingers. I did that, and the network started to work again. I have no idea what happened.

Total time for this repair: about 10 minutes.