Small Changes; BIG RETURNS

Now to give you the full picture, I'll start by saying that Bob has never had a positive relationship with any computer he has ever met.  

When we lived in the Yukon there was a winterfest called the Frostbite Festival. It was mostly an excuse to get a little wild and blow off some steam in mid February -- or 'debush' as they called it. By then we felt like winter should be over soon, but knew that Spring Breakup of the ice on the Yukon River would not come until April and we could have 6 more weeks of cold and snow ahead of us.

Source: http://www.yukonriverpanel.com/fisheries.htm

There were dances and dog sled races and can can girls and contests.  In my day one of the funniest events was called the 'Chain Saw Pull' which appealed mightily anyone who had ever tried to start a resistant chain saw or lawn mower.  You had to pull the cord 40 times with each arm and then throw the infernal machine as far as you could.

Source: http://fccmissions.org/announcements/kako

Bob has absolutely no patience for any machine that does not perform the way he expects it to. He feels man should be master of machine at all times. He and our old chainsaw entered that event one winter, so I am pretty certain that when doing battle with my computer he has more than once imagined himself hurling my it out the window, watching it plummet to the ground two stories down, and listening for the satisfying crash as it smashes to smithereens.

What possessed Bob to buy his own tiny notebook computer when he was working out of town, I'll never know, but he's endlessly patient with her (I think of it as a her & I call her Lola ...). When our wireless service went down for a couple of days, he heroically leapt into action, disconnected the router, and went back to the cable hook-up -- all before I got home from work.

Source: http://sbeau.wordpress.com/2008/11/

The tech guys who walked him through this procedure had him convinced that the problem lay in the router, and he's been after me to get a new one ever since. He was really feeling lost without Lola, but I have been resisting, and when the modem itself went down, I knew I was right. 2nd failure and no router involved? Methinks the problem lies in the modem!!

Today I tackled the modem/router issue by trying to get our wirless service back. First (55 minutes), I tidied up the mess of cords and transformers and labeled them all.  Next (15 minutes) I reconnected the router.  Finally, I wanted to be sure Lola could access the internet using the wireless service,  but to get her connected meant I had to remember a Network Key that I had hastily assigned the router when I enabled my own laptop 2 days before a major conference last June.

It seems the old router is no longer covered under warranty. The Linksys people wanted to charge me $29 for the secret 'how to' information, but I have my stubborn moments as well and could not be persuaded to pay them the cost of a new router to find out how to re-enable the old one!!!! I started looking online for how to do this.

Source: http://newsroom.hrsa.gov/inside-hrsa/april07/databank.htm

3 hours later, and thanks to the rainboi-ga who left the all the steps (others had given part of the info, but not everything I needed to complete this mission) at Google Answers in 2006, I finally found out that Linksys has all the information I needed stored online -- including the 10 digit Network Key password (which in retrospect I should have been able to guess). I didn't have to pay a penny of the ransom demanded by Linksys to see it.

Here in a nutshell are the steps from rainboi-ga with a few points of clarification from me:

(1) I assume that you have a password set and you don't know what it is.
    (She sure got that right!) 
    What you need to do is to login to you router's control panel. 
    (OK...)

(2) Enter the following address in your browser:192.168.1.1 . 
     By default, Linksys has left USERNAME blank 
     and set the PASSWORD as 'admin'.

(3) This will bring up your file in the Linksys system. 
     Click the wireless tab and you'll see the page with your network's name. 
     Beneath that click Wireless Security (bottom row, second from the left). 
     There you'll find any password information you need in order to give 
     others access to your wireless service. 

(4) My own advice to you all and I will do this myself immediately after I finish this post is:
     tape this information to the bottom of the router.

Then you can easily tell anyone who might be visiting or house-sitting how to connect to the internet, 
or you'll know how to get put Humpty Dumptyback together again when you want to set your system 
all back the way it was before the helpers got at it.