Monday, November 12, 2007

Vista dialup plus winmodem -- can't help

A very good friend of mine bought a new computer. The new PC has Home Vista Basic on it. It works well enough for most things (that I try, anyway). There was some confusion with printer permissions for her children (she's the only administrator). I sorted that out a few weeks ago. Now she's complaining because there's a problem with the winmodem. I actually tested this a few days ago and, if I dialup to her (prepaid) ISP after a reboot, it works. I stay online for hours. But when I disconnect and try to dialup again it always fails. Diagnostics is useless (all it says is that the connection failed).

Rebooting fixes things. Just reboot, and I'll be able to connect again reliably. Unfortunately, after disconnecting, dialing up never works again until the next reboot.

I'm not able to help her because, much as I'd love to switch her to Ubuntu, I have never had any success with winmodems on linux and I'm not going to give her my US Robotics USB modem (if I could find it).

I guess she's just going to have to reboot between dialup connections to her ISP. It's the price to pay for going with windows. I'm sure things would go better with windows XP. Maybe I'll have her go back to where she bought her PC and get them to downgrade her to XP from Vista.

Microsoft, a whole bunch of bastards who force a pregnant woman to go to her PC store so they'll tell her they can't downgrade her to XP.

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