A Series of Unfortunate Failures
I couldn’t get online for the past two days.
It all started with my LAN card failing and then later throwing up a BSOD. So I thought I’d use the USB mode of the modem to avoid buying another Ethernet card. However I couldn’t get the modem to connect to Airtel through the USB cable (no, it wasn’t a cable problem).
I called Airtel tech support and they sent over this dull guy. He checked Device Manager under USB devices and found nothing. This was because the modem actually shows up under Network Adapters. I had already installed drivers for it and the device was active and working. Anyway,this dumbass put in his drivers CD, confidently double clicked setup.ico and was treated to the loading screen of Photoshop CS3 (since that was the program assigned to that extension). After fumbling about a bit he finally got to the setup.exe file… which froze at the end. So after a restart he finished the drivers setup and when there was still no connection he said that it was a USB problem. I showed him the modem listed under Network Adapters before kicking him out of my house. Then I went and bought a new LAN card.
The Intex card I bought for Rs. 150 didn’t connect to my modem either. It showed up in Device Manager but the LAN connection LED remained unlit. I took it to Ragha’s house for troubleshooting and figured out that the card was faulty. So I got it replaced, tested it at Ragha’s place and then installed it on my PC. There was a lot of running around checking if cables were the problem and wading into Windows options to see if there was a problem there in the middle of all this chaos. Extremely frustrating.
I’ve got it working now so I can get back to whatever I was doing.
visu says:
Hmm.. By the way, when you were off, they have hacked the ampli5.org domain. Now its okay i think..
Oh wait, I observe a pattern here. Ahan. . .
Posted on July 12th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Marc Z says:
That made me laugh. Yeah I got them fixed by performing a rollback to the most recent backup.
Posted on July 12th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
xavier says:
you should have called me….. i could have actually put what they teach me at HCL to use
Posted on July 13th, 2008 at 6:27 am
George says:
NO! Why did you buy an Intex card?! I warned you about Intex! They use a Silan Microsystems chipset that claims to be Realtek 8139D. Why did you do this?! You must never do it again. Whip yourself 40 times as penance.
Posted on July 13th, 2008 at 11:17 pm
Arun M says:
Yeah! as George says, Intex stuff sucks. Even their mousepads.
And follow my standard rule -> If anything goes wrong, blame Raja Deepak
Posted on July 15th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Marc Z says:
I didn’t remember that Intex was the crappy card you had bought. It was the cheapest so I bought it. The DLink was Rs. 300.
Also XP had drivers for the card and it works perfectly now.
Arun M, I agree. Their stuff is really low quality. We blame Ragha for all our problems.
Posted on July 15th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
George says:
I bought a Zebronics card, same fake chipset. While it may appear to work perfectly with those drivers, try pushing it and you’ll see the trouble (do a transfer over the network and see)
Posted on July 16th, 2008 at 5:43 pm