Why, oh why?
In various capacities, one of the things I do with my life is write software. I am of the (increasingly rare) variety of engineers who believe that things on computers should just work, and that when they don't work, you should be able to dig as deep as you like to figure out why.
My employer has just purchased two Dell Latitude D820 laptop computers. Let me say first that they are, on the whole, really nice boxes. Lots of disk, lots of RAM, fairly light, nice big hi-res screen, good touchpad, every type of interface you can imagine. Even (if you want to pay for the service) the ability to connect to 3G phone networks for data.
But when it comes to the wireless network connection it fails my expectations (outlined above) on both counts. I have just spent a very frustrating six hours (yes, 6 hours) trying to get the stupid thing to connect to our wireless network, including two and a half hours on the phone to Dell technical support, with no success.
We have other Dell laptops in our office, even of quite similar models, and they can access our network fine. But not these new ones. They appear to connect, but can only hold the connection for about six seconds, then drop it. Then appear to connect again, and so on, ad infinitum. Grrr.
The worst of it is, I brought one of them home, and tried connecting to my home network. It uses the same security setup, and I use a very similar model router... and it just works. Why??? What's different?
The worst of it is, Windows assumes I have no clue and wouldn't want to know what's going on in the network stack, and so will not let me see. I can't dig around and figure out what's going on; I just have to trust Micro$oft. In this case, the trust is badly misplaced.
The only humour to be found in all this is that the Windows service that tries to do the configuration is called "Wireless Zero Configuration." You can say that again...
My employer has just purchased two Dell Latitude D820 laptop computers. Let me say first that they are, on the whole, really nice boxes. Lots of disk, lots of RAM, fairly light, nice big hi-res screen, good touchpad, every type of interface you can imagine. Even (if you want to pay for the service) the ability to connect to 3G phone networks for data.
But when it comes to the wireless network connection it fails my expectations (outlined above) on both counts. I have just spent a very frustrating six hours (yes, 6 hours) trying to get the stupid thing to connect to our wireless network, including two and a half hours on the phone to Dell technical support, with no success.
We have other Dell laptops in our office, even of quite similar models, and they can access our network fine. But not these new ones. They appear to connect, but can only hold the connection for about six seconds, then drop it. Then appear to connect again, and so on, ad infinitum. Grrr.
The worst of it is, I brought one of them home, and tried connecting to my home network. It uses the same security setup, and I use a very similar model router... and it just works. Why??? What's different?
The worst of it is, Windows assumes I have no clue and wouldn't want to know what's going on in the network stack, and so will not let me see. I can't dig around and figure out what's going on; I just have to trust Micro$oft. In this case, the trust is badly misplaced.
The only humour to be found in all this is that the Windows service that tries to do the configuration is called "Wireless Zero Configuration." You can say that again...
posted by Tom at
22:20
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