China and SARS :: home :: 3D Tutorials
* Plug and Play *
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This past weekend, we went to the Border's Book Store in Palo Alto. We just like to get out of the house when it comes to studying and reading. I pop open my laptop and Windows XP tells me there are a couple of wifi networks I can hookup to. Tmobile and Apple Store. I look across the street and I see the Apple Store. Neat! I decided to hook up to the apple store because I knew that tmobile is a commercial service and costs money (although looking at their plans lately, they have some nice prices...$30/month for unlimited wi-fi! Now if only I could get that service in my home...). I connected and the LEDs on my wifi card went solid green and orange. My computer slowed to a crawl. Uh oh I thought. I tried in vain to tell Windows XP to unhook from the network. I had to pull the card out. As soon as I did, everything was fine. When I plugged it back in, BAM! Same thing! So I pulled the card out and went without wifi for the afternoon working on my graphing tool.
When I got home, I plugged the wifi card back into my laptop. Lights came on then, poof! Nothing. Hmmm curious. Unplugged it, tried it again. Poof! Nothing. Curious. Rinse repeat. After a couple of tries, I figured my wifi card was dead!! The Apple Store killed my wifi card!! Arggh! Luckily I still had my 100BT wire card and plugged that in to continue working. I promptly ordered a new card from Microsoft's internal ordering system.
Here's the ultra cool part. I got the new card about an hour ago. I popped it in and after 5 seconds, it just worked. Let me repeat. It just worked. No drivers, no configuring IRQs, no tweaking this or that. I must be old. I remember the days when getting a new gizmo or gadget for your computer required hours and hours maybe even days and days of fiddling with IRQs, DMAs, Address settings, etc. to get the thing to work. I know a lot of the mac heads are laughing right now since they've had plug and play since the old days.
I guess, I've been used to the new "it-actually-works" Plug and Play for a while, but when I signed for my new network card, I had a split-second flashback of back in the days as a teenager ripping apart my computer over and over to get my new sound card or video card working. Funny...
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