katakat.com bytes from a participant observer

I borrowed my dad's laptop to do some PC work at home, since I have an old iMac and it can't handle MS FrontPage (yes, I know, it's not DW, but that's all I'm allowed to use at work). Sooo, I decided to try again to hook up a wireless network. I'd tried this years ago for my iMac, which actually has an Airport card in it (and can pick up any of a variety of networks in my condo complex, which is another story...) but for whatever reason the router kept forgetting its own existence and had to be re-installed for each use (mental note: this was a DLink router). It was a bad experience all around, and I ended up just hooking the Mac into the cable modem directly. Luckily, there was a wall outlet right next to my desk already, so the cable guy just had to pull the wire. Whew. That said, Nick tells me to go to BestBuy and get a $49 NetGear 4-port Wireless "g" router. I do, but forget to take my notes, of course. Dazed by the selection, I get the $49 router, and a few days later go to set it up and realize it wasn't the NetGear router I'd gotten, it was a Linksys. Geez, all those boxes looked the same on the shelf; even the routers themselves are the same blue and black color. Cursing myself for getting fooled, I call Nick, who says the two are pretty much the same. Just pop in the CD and get going. Ok. He also offers his support service ... at the going rate ... of $50/hour. Yeah, right. So the CD takes me through the setup, and it really was pretty easy, once I'd figured out which cables went where, since I had one hardwired computer already and just wanted to add the laptop as a wireless device to the mix. (The CD graphics were a lot more basic.) The whole process took about 10-15 minutes, really; the laptop saw the router right away and signal strength was EXCELLENT (of course, the router is sitting right next to me!). And then I'm one button away from Finish, when it asks if I want to install a free trial of Norton Anti-Virus. Hmmm, ok. Long story short, one frustratingly-long and profanity-filled hour later I was still trying to get the laptop unfrozen to uninstall the infernal Norton which was dueling with the resident McAfee anti-virus. Argh. I'd forgotten that Dad already had installed McAfee. Once Norton was removed, the laptop still complained it could not see the router-- I could have held the freaking router in front of the laptop and said "See??!" it was so physically close! But noooo. I don't know how I flubbed along and finally got the network to work, but it was truly frustrating and wasted much precious time. Moral of the story: only install one program at a time, and make sure it works, before installing another one. At least I'd had enough experience with PCs that I realized it was the fault of the anti-virus program, not the wireless hardware. And that also reminded me why I love my iMac.