dragon says hi

[WillRiker]

So this is a ramble to say Hi from dragon.

She feels as if her right arm has been cut off as she can't get online for some unknown reason.

She could connect fine on both Friday & Saturday and since Sunday morning she can't get online. So Kelly went down today to see if she could figure it out, and all she kept getting was an error message regarding the modem having some DNS error or something...I forget now. But anyways, Kelly couldn't figurte it out, so dragon said she would call AOL support.

Now before anyone says anything....I did tell her that people don't call it AO-Hell for nothing, but she signed up with them before I even knew she had bought the laptop.

I would have loved to be a fly on the wall for the conversation though.

Turns out that she got someone who, if they were even in the UK at all, came to the country on a floating door (I'm stealing that line from Stewie in family Guy as I thought it was great), but I suspect she was talking to an Indian call centre. Now the person she had didn't speak great English to start with and she was talking to my Mam, who basically just about knows how to turn the laptop on, beyond that....no idea at all.

So the Indian woman was telling dragon to check this and it could be her firewall, to which dragon said "Firewall???" and the discussion went on like this for some time. Eventually she gave in and went to get a neighbour who knows some PC stuff and was at least able to communicate with the call centre.

At the end of the day, they were still no further forward. But AO-Hell told her that it wasn't a problem at their end, so it must be something on my mams side.

So I ended up leaving the house....yes, you read that right, and i had a look. Basically uninstalled Norton which she had on there for some reason, (I think it came with the laptop), and checked her Windows Firewall settings and such and they all seemed fine. Turned out that the neighbour had done a system restore to Friday night before I got there, but that hadn't fixed the problem.

So I basically checked all the connections and everything, and as best as I can tell her laptop just isn't communicating with her modem for the broadband connection at all.

The towel has now been thrown in and she's taking the whole lot, laptop, modem and all, back to PC World from where she bought it and as it's under warranty, she's gonna play up her PC un-knowledge, (not hard to do), and see if they can figure it out for her.

But she says that she's missing this place like mad, as it's kinda like her online therapy, and told me that once I got home I had to let people know why she isn't around right now......so I have.

[Scavok]

Does she have her laptop directly connected to the modem?, or is this a wireless /router thing going on?

[WillRiker]

Well I don't really know jack about laptops but I'm pretty sure that all the crap she got from AO-Hell originally said that to use it wireless she would need to have a desktop PC hooked up before she could use the laptop on a wireless system...and she doesn't have one, so yes, it's directly wired into the broadband modem.

[Maximal]

has she shut down and rebooted the modem?

does she have all the cables plugged in fully into the correct places?

what brand is the modem?

[WillRiker]

Yes for the 1st one.....

I checked and she double checked the second.

As for the brand......I honestly can't remember, it was whatever AOL sent out when she signed up to the Broadband package.

[Maximal]

if there is a link light that shows a connection to the computer check to see if it is getting a connection, also if a system restore was done, she might need to reinstall the cd from AOL along with her account info

[WillRiker]

Yeah, I was thinking along the lines of a re-install, but I was down there a little late tonight to start going through all that.

To be honest I got it to the point where it was trying to dial through, it just seemed to get hung up at the 2nd step, basically looked to me like the laptop wasn't communicating with the modem.

I checked the connections, (well as well as my eyes would let me), and she double checked them, but it's possible one of the cables may be damaged or something. I'll see what she says tomorrow.

[Maximal]

good luck

if it is one of those setups that she can just unplug and take with her, have her take it to the neighbours and try it there

[Hayley]

Aww tell her i said hi

I know what its like when u got no internet, its hell.

But i agree, i call it A.O. Hell too

[Purple Dragon]

im back, my wonderful daughter in law. kelly came down we had to ring a.o.hell.after kel had unpluged and pluged everything.it took kel less than 2 mins to follow the instructions and hi presto it was fixed. my neighbour was on phone to a.o. hell for an hour and got nowhere.hooray for KELLY.