Item 1 Description of situation that makes you want to throw your laptop out the window:
Local only. If you have never seen this, give thanks to the Lord. It pops up at the most inopportune time. You've just gotten to the coffee shop, or you've ran into the house to try to pay your online bills, or check your latest viagra spam. You bring your trusted machine out of hibernate, open up your browser and... nothing.
You check your hard switch on your wireless, make sure its enabled in network connections, and then you notice the tiny icon in the lower right, the one that usually has the nice little globe on it, proclaiming that you, tiny mortal have access to the world and all its online treasures... but what's this? No globe. Confused you move your mouse slowly down to the tiny little monitors, and up pops the dreaded words, "Local Only."
You jump into your terminal, run ipconfig and watch as the uncanny number of network adapters (you can only see two physical on the dang thing) looking for answers. Yes you have a valid ip, yet nothing pings outside the local network. Cursing, you reboot, to no avail, you delete the wireless profile, nothing, you reload drivers, you do a rain dance, you sacrifice a chicken (by the way the coffee shop frowns on this) nothing. Finally you grab a patch cord and connect directly, crisis averted... or is it...
I have had this happen on secure networks, wide open ones, with every authentication you can think of. Somehow the problem has always fixed itself within a day or two, but I've had to hardwire several times. Strangely, I can run xubuntu on this same machine and never have a lick of trouble out of it.
Item 2 List of Offenders:
Microsoft, specifically Vista, specifically wireless
Item 3 Suggested course of action:
I have read a few dozen articles on this, yet to find a solution, um, kick Bill Gates in the head
Item 4 Other thoughts:
Why do they fix what isn't broken? Why put all the network options in ten different places? From what I've heard windows 7 doesn't even have classic view in the control panel anymore????
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No Classic view of Control panel!!!!! What do you see then?!!! That sucks because new laptops or computers will have it pre-installed.
ReplyDeleteThe new view that you turn off immediately, categories that essentially make no dang sense.
ReplyDeleteI always change my control panel to list view in the start menu. BTW, can we still call it that since there is no "Start" on it? It now looks more like the windows logo inside of Glenda The Good Witch's bubble. It's kinda like Ballmer did a spinning back kick to Glenda to knock her out and take over.
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