Lady’s Router Problem

One morning I was sitting on the porch and Barb was out shopping.  Two ladies came up to the door.  I thought they wanted to see Barb but they said they were looking for someone who knew something about computers to help with one of the ladies’ computers.  I said I could try to help them.

So we walked over to their house.  They set up their two laptops in the porch on a desk beside each other.  They were both old Vista laptops.  One of the computers worked and the other didn’t.  The ladies said that they had been on the phone with the Internet Service Provider for two hours that morning.  The person on the phone couldn’t help them but said there was some problem with the IP address.

I spent six hours working on the problem to find out what was wrong with the IP address.  The computer that wasn’t working said it was connected to a router but when we tried to look something up on the web it came up with the message “Page Not Found”.  It was not connected to the same router as the computer that was working.  I found the router in the bedroom that the working computer was hooked up to and when I tried to hook up the other computer to it I just got an error message.

I spent hours looking up things on the internet on one computer and trying out fixes of the IP address on the other computer.

I was about to give up.  I was very hungry because I hadn’t had any lunch and it was almost dinner time.  I decided to try just one more thing.  I typed the error message for the router into Google and it suggested that I uninstall the wireless card and reinstall it.

So I uninstalled the wireless card.  Then I turned off the computer and turned it back on again.  The computer automatically found the wireless card and reinstalled it.  Then I could see the router with no error message and was able to hook up the internet.

The two ladies and their husbands were relaxing outside drinking wine and eating cheese and crackers.  I sat with them and gobbled down some food.  Then Barb drove up in our golf cart and joined us.  The lady with the fixed computer was so happy.  She had sat with me the whole time and she was impressed at how I could work for so long on the broken computer and never get upset and swear.  It was a good thing because I found out later that she was a very religious lady.

She asked how she could pay me back.  I said that she could pay me back in Diet Pepsi.  The next day she and her husband came back with a carton of 36 Diet Pepsi.