Yet Another Reason to Hate Mondays!

Beling FSD9050 For some unknown reason, my Belkin F5D9050 wireless adapter decided to try my patience yesterday. There was no problem in the morning. But when I came back home at around seven o’clock and switched on the PC, I had no or very little Internet access. By little I mean slow connections stable for only a minute or two. Restart didn’t help. Router reboot didn’t help either and neither did system restore. I tried everything with and without firewall. But I wasn’t even able to connect to my router configurator page.

Half past eight and I am beggining to get pissed off. I haven’t been able to check my mail since 10 in the morning (I don’t log into my personal email at work). So, what now? I unplug every cable and move the case, monitor and keyboard to the living room where my wireless router is. LAN works fine. Damn! I dig up my old and painfuly slow laptop and try the WAN, again. It works! What the hell?! There is no problem what so ever. Fast like a rocket. Google leads me to Microsoft support article 928233. By now, it’s been almost three hours. Note that at the same time, I am on the phone, helping a friend with his wireless PCI card…

Before I go and mess with Vista’s registery, I decided to connect the adapter one more time. Just for the hell of it! It’s working. I didn’t do anything except reconnecting its cable and it is working like how it should be! Why didn’t I do it before I move the whole goddamned thing to my living room?! D’oh! It’s working just like how it was this morning! Moving back to my room now. Cables are connected. Switch on. What the hell?! Same DNS error crap, again! Local only network. Damn you Bill. I hope you forget all your passwords! Going back to my laptop, I go throught the registery edit thingy.

After backing up Vista’s registery, I edit it as it is instructed. Restart. Phewww… No more DNS error, but still unstable connection. download and upload drop every 5 minutes or so and it takes about 30 seconds to get back to normal. Windows update says my Belkin adapter driver is up to date. Belkin website says the same thing, but also provides a beta driver. So I download and install it. Everything goes back to normal! A simple driver update that I should have done after the first PC/router restart. Why didn’t I do it five hours ago? Because I trusted Vista when it said the driver was up to date!

And that was my yesterday’s story!