Deborah is a registered nurse who also teaches at a community college, and has several computers at home sharing a broadband connection from Rogers cable. I'd visited her before to help her with an elearning component of one of her courses, showing her how to build a "WebQuest" to guide her students. She called me to report that when the cable installer moved her cable modem to the basement, she could no longer connect wirelessly to the Internet. The cable company technician left after hooking up a new line to the cable modem, saying that there was a problem with her network router.
With the modem moved, Deborah's PCs could access the Net only when a PC was directly connected to the modem.
When the modem was connected as before to the Linksys router, even though the PCs showed a wireless network "connected" with a "strong signal", Internet Explorer's Web accesses always returned the error "The page cannot be found". Every Internet user has seen that message: after a typing error in the address bar, when a wire is disconnected from your computer, when there's a break in the ISP's connection (maybe because a wet tree branch shorted out telephone connections), or when there's a problem at the target website. (Click here to see some real-world and creative examples of this error message, which is also known as the "404 Error".)
Deborah had two PCs, one running Windows XP, the other Windows Vista, and before the modem move both had been able to the Internet connect wirelessly. The most obvious culprit seemed to be the router, so I phoned Linksys, where an agent led me through the process of checking out and redefining the Network definitions ("From the Start menu choose Control Panel, then Network Connections, then ..."). When none of that helped, the agent claimed to be certain that the problem was caused by the cable company's "online security". I called them and endured their "speech understanding" voice jail to reach a human agent, who led me through a similar process of Network Connection check out and redefinition ... which didn't solve the problem.
The cable agent said that the router agent was wrong, that there was no such thing as "online security" active on Deborah's cable link; there was probably a problem with the router. When I heard that, I thought "Oh no, more finger-pointing!", and worried I had become the ball in a game of unservice Ping-Pong. But fortunately the cable agent was not afflicted by certainty, and suggested a possible solution: "Turn of both the modem and the router, wait 10 seconds, then turn them back on, making sure you turn the modem on first." And after that my very next attempt to access the Web was successful. Problem solved.
But why couldn't I turn on the router before I turned on the modem? Other electronic devices don't have this problem, e.g. I can turn on my TV before putting a videotape into the VCR. Maybe they don't teach all cyber engineers about system complexity and black-box design; or maybe the managers and marketers browbeat development teams into signing off on untested or clearly faulty products; or maybe computer system design is just too complicated for us. As if to underline that pessimistic thought, just as I was about to leave her I heard Deborah wail, "The problem is back!". Sure enough, her computer screen showed "The page cannot be found", but this time the problem had a different cause. The green "Line Active" light on the cable modem had gone out, indicating that the ISP's Internet link had dropped. That problem lasted only a minute or two, and fixed itself, after which the PC could again access the Web. It's been my experience that cable and telecom companies' Internet connections always drop occasionally, and unpredictably.
But there is something you can do to reduce the occurrence of computer failures with indeterminable causes. You can reduce the unpredictability that your own equipment adds to the chaotic world of unreliable providers of hardware, software and Internet services: As much as you can, minimize the number of independent components in your computer system, especially components from different vendors. A notebook PC with its integrated display is less likely to have compatibility problems than is a desktop PC with a separate monitor; a new PC with vendor-installed software is less likely to have incompatibilities than an old PC with a operating system upgrade.
But not many of can afford to buy a new computer every time we succumb to the siren call of a new hardware device or a new software functionality. We think, "I'm no newbie; I know how to install a new operating system, or a even a new hard disk!" But it would be a lot less stressful if we retired our cranky old computers and hired new ones, and it might even turn out to be cheaper.
Now if only I would heed my own advice ...
Stan Yack
Instructional Designer and Softsmith
