CelticNorse

How It Aught Not To Be

So last night I was at my brothers house troubleshooting issues connecting their Xbox360 to their Verizon gateway via a 50ft ethernet cable.  It had been not working in very weird ways.  I took the Dell laptop they have running Windows 7 up to the “game room” to test the cable.  To ensure I was talking over the cable I disabled wireless on the laptop.  Cable was fine.  Xbox is hosed.  That’s another story.

Next morning: 

I get this text from John (my brother), “Call me how do i put laptop back on wireless” followed minutes later by “lil help”.  First let me say that getting a text from my brother is wierd.  Nuff said!  As soon as I read the text though I did the classic Homer “DOH!”  Now I have to provide Windows 7  phone support from my home with nothing but my iMac to guide me.

I call him and he starts to go through screens on the laptop describing and reading stuff to me in the hope that I will recognize where the settings are we need. It’s not working.  Now anyone reading this is probably wondering why I didn’t have him simply right click on something and choose “Enable” or “Turn on Radio”.  The short answer to that question is “That’s what this story is about.  Stop trying to ruin it!”

Not knowing the settings screens by memory as I do in XP I googled “windows 7 enable adapter”.  Which led me to a page with this block of text:

Open Network Connections by clicking the Start button , clicking Control Panel, clicking Network and Internet, clicking Network and Sharing Center, and then clicking Manage network connections.

That is seriously stoopid!  I am reading this on my iMac looking up at the Wifi symbol in the menu bar.  I right click on it and have the option to “Turn AirPort Off”.  How god damn simple is that?  

Mind blown.