For whatever reason the computer in my living room has decided to make sure that anything relating to wireless connections to it no longer works. The problem with this is that the living room PC is completely dependent upon wireless connectivity for most interactions with it. To send mouse and keyboard signals from the couch it uses a Logitech wireless system. The Internet is beamed to it through 802.11. Despite being so dependent upon these wireless tools I decided it was the most powerful computer in my home since it was set-up to show movies and download lots of MP3s as a latecomer on the computer network.

The problems started when I dropped the Logitech wireless mouse on the floor about a week ago and I guess the mouse failed the drop test. From then on I couldn't use the wireless mouse. The computer outputs to the television but I found a nice little workaround a long time ago which is that I can use Remote Desktop to connect to it. That was going fine until today when remote desktop mysteriously stopped working as I was doing some editing of pictures on the living room PC.

Now I had a real challenge. The problem is that the PC isn't on the network and is not accessible via a mouse and keyboard. So how do I fix it. I tried the Microsoft reboot salute a couple of times but it still didn't find the network. Then I rebooted the router and the DSL modem for good measure. I finally resorted to using a mouse that I had gotten at a trade show designed for portable use with laptops that had a cable of about 2 feet that kept trying to retract. This was quite fun to use in conjunction with a 42" television about a foot away from me that kept giving me useful prompts like "Repair this" and then would tell me "The system was unable to repair this because". I still haven't fixed this problem and I suspect that it has something to do with trying to use my laptop in the middle of the night and installing Microsoft SP2 because that is the only thing that I did differently last night than most nights. The laptop was giving similar annoying wireless networking errors.

So I came-up with a solution at least to try to do the fix. I lay on the floor of the living room on the rug. I took the mouse from my bedroom that is nice and old-fashioned and has a cord but connects to a USB port. I connected it to the living room PC to give me some more room. I then searched for the problem on the laptop by sitting on the couch. There was a mention of the problem on a site called PCHell that after installing SP2 on WindowsXP machines that they had a bug that causes them to show the error message that I was seeing "This connection has limited or no connectivity. You might not be able to access the Internet or some network resources. "

The solution was to install a driver from Microsoft at this page. Now this would have been easy enough if I had a working mouse, keyboard, and network connection but what appeared to be my only option was to use the dreaded floppy disk. Of course, the laptop didn't have the floppy disk installed. It only had the CD-ROM drive available. Since this was useless I went back into the bedroom to seek a floppy disk. I don't need a floppy disk very often so at first I couldn't find one. I finally found one that Sarah had been using to move files around in the floppy drive of the computer in the living room. Now this seemed like a big win for me. So I rushed back into the bedroom only to find that I had the mouse attached to the living room computer. So I moved the mouse and made a floppy disk with the patch on it and went back to the living room. Then when I went to find the file on the floppy disk the computer in the living room decided that it didn't have an A: drive and wouldn't recognize the floppy disk.

Now this is a fairly awful situation since I now needed to go to plan b to get the patch onto the computer in the living room. So I looked at what it could recognize and found that it knew that it had a CD-ROM drive, so I considered burning a CD-ROM to place the patch onto it, and that it recognized the Smart Card reader for my camera memory. So I connected the camera memory to the laptop and saved the file onto the smart card. Unfortunately the USB mouse from the living room, the keyboard, and the card reader all wanted a USB slot but there were only two available so I went keyboardless and copied the file to the desktop. I ran the executable, rebooted and voila the livingroom computer was back on the network.

Then I went over to the laptop and noticed that while I was fixing the living room computer it had the same error message. I had downloaded the patch directly to the card reader so I moved the card reader and the card with the patch in it back over to the laptop and installed the patch there. I then moved the mouse back to the bedroom computer, hooked-up the keyboard again on the living room computer and tested my access to the living room computer from the bedroom now that I had a mouse once more.

It seems like life isn't that much simpler since they got rid of the wires. I am wondering what I gained other than a headache and an aptitude for plugging in and unplugging wires?