New toys

I finally got around to persuading my manager to hook me up with one of those new fancy laptops at work. Fancy that is, in comparison to the P300, 256MB RAM piece of shit that I had been kicking the crap out of for years. After two hard drive replacements, two ethernet cards, more HD formats than I care to remember he conceded that I wasn't getting much work done on it. Either trade me up or it's going out of the window. Shortly followed by myself, screaming something about core dumps.

So - yay! I get this new laptop and bring it home in fond anticipation of making use of this super new 'internal wireless modem'. Just turn it on, and it will pick up all the home D-Link wireless network I have set up, right? Wrong. Turn it on. No signal. Refresh, no signal. Input the SSID, no signal. Run diagnostics..

Microcode memory test failed.
This tests verifies that the network controller internal memory is functioning properly. The test writes patterned values to the memory and reading back the results. The test fails if an erroneous value is read back. The network controller will not function without its internal memory.

I'm guessing this is telling me in technical terms, that tne shiny new internal modem is fucked. Kaput. Broken. In an anti-working state. Luckily for me I have a spare USB D-Link wireless bridge kicking around, so I plug that in. Works right away. Thanks Dell, please leave the networking to the experts. D-Link, I'll always love you. So I guess it's back to the hell that is our IT department tomorrow in the vain hope that one of them might give a shit about my plight, get off their arse, and actually do something about it. Failing that, I'm going around with my screwdriver to nab someone else's.. I agree it's not that big a deal to plug in a usb wireless adapter, but hell this shit should just WORK. I don't want ANY wires coming out of my new computer. At least the battery on this one seems to last longer than 5 minutes.. Hooray for wireless blogging!