2009 Archive, Technology, Web Browser Pain 1

My wife has been complaining for the past three months that (almost) every time she tried to browse the web --- by this, I mean viewing video, coming across our 11-15 Mbs Comcast connection --- that her browser would stop, freeze up, then restart, sometimes, or sometimes it would not restart. It kept popping up a little window saying "You are now connected," indicating, to her surprise, that she had been momentarily disconnected. It was driving her nuts. Or maybe what was driving her nuts was that every time I used her computer, it seemed to work just fine, although a little slow.

So, times being semi-hard, financially speaking, I did not want to take her computer in to have someone go over it at $60 per hour, only to tell us it was fine. Maybe there was another problem. Her computer sits on the dining room table directly in between the 2.4Ghz Wireless phone base station in one room, and the remote wireless phone in the living room. Here's what I know: Every time someone is on the internet --- a 2.4Ghz wireless connection to the router in another room behind the remote wireless phone --- If someone answers this phone in the living room, the Internet connection fails. Every single time.

And, if someone is on the wireless phone and we start the microwave sitting next to the dining room, the interference with the phone is bad enough to force us to use the land-line phone, at least until the microwave stops.

So, my guess is, that the Wireless phone base station has to "talk" to the remote phone, even when no one is using it for a phone call. Maybe that bit of interference was disconnecting her from the router every few minutes. So, I bought (for $45) a replacement wireless phone running on 1.97 Ghz, which is not close to the 2.4 Ghz of the router, or the 900 ghz of the wireless headset from the Television. (This is really nice if I want to watch something while my wife takes a nap on the couch.) So now we can talk on the phone while browsing the Web, and we can talk on the phone while microwaving popcorn --- but things were still not perfect.

I finally took her computer into Office Depot to have their local whiz-guy look at it. After reviewing it, he pronounced it "clean" and didn't want to charge me the $59.99 it would take to look into it more closely. In his opinion, whatever they could do would not make any visible difference to us. He suggested that maybe I should use Firefox instead. So, I got to take it home again --- such fast service --- and it didn't cost a penny. That was Tuesday. Little did I know that on Thursday it would not be her computer that failed, but mine.