Adventures in WiFi

So, the wireless router in our house died Sunday night. Fine, fine. That’s what I get for buying a $30 Netgear router. After wasting 30 mins of my life on tech support (I never ever learn) I just hung up, realized this guy didn’t know shit, and came to the conclusion that I now have a nice looking paper weight. So we replace the router with an $80 Linksys WiFi router with Speedboost. I have set up linksys routers before, I’ll have it going in 10 mins.

Number One rule of Computing: Nothing is EVER as easy as it’s suppose to be. I set up the network with WPA, everything seemed fine and dandy, but one computer didn’t support WPA, so I took it off. Settled, right? NOPE. The network goes down. I reset it a lot, and to spare the gory details, 2 hours later, every one is actually connected accept me, but I can still get on the internet. I don’t know why. Some kind of gateway I guess where I was still connecting to the internet through the router, but not the network itself. Anyway, it keeps disconnecting me. I’m to tired to deal with it and I go to bed. This morning, I wake up, surprise, I’m disconnected. I say whatever, and take a shower. I come back, and magically, as if Jesus came down and fixed it, I am not only online, but actually connected to my network. I did nothing from the time I got into the shower to the time I came back.

Now, I pride myself on knowing most things computer/network related, but I have NO IDEA why the router/network was behaving the way it did. If anyone can explain, that would be great. Thanks….Later!