When I get there the laptop is on, the TV is working and so is the phone.
She is on VirginMedia but on the weirdest setup as done by their engineer. There is a modem with the fibre optic cable, phone (RJ11), ethernet (RJ45) and power cable. Everything is on and the lights are green. Then there is a separate D-link wireless router. It has a power cable and the ethernet cable from the modem is in the Global port - it has four other ports for networking devices. All is OK.
Now, the wi-fi icon in the laptop systray says it is fine and the list of local wi-fi networks shows as being connected to the right network and with internet access... except that there isn't. A look in the state of the nework adapters shows the wireless as fine but the local network cable as unplugged. The laptop is on wi-fi, I checked. Maybe the one on the router is the problem. I unplug it and try all the other ports with the same problem. Try another cable. The modem is saying that it is talking to the router via the ethernet cable and the router says that it is listening. I try some other tricks but eventually M says she will phone Virgin.
Nice lad on the other end and we go through all that I have done and he goes through his script. We finally get to the reboot option, it is always there, and that's where the fun starts. The lappy has just been auto-updated to W10 and it tells us not to turn off whilst it upgrades. It then reboots and says not to turn it off whilst it installs and configures the upgrades - nearly 90 minutes!!! Whilst all this was happening I was asking about any problems with W10. There had been none with the modems, they were fine, but the D-Link router is old and it maybe needs replacing. Anyway, the computer is now working but still with the no internet problem so I suggest to him that I will do a hard reset (again) on the router - Hey Presto!
Now, M wanders around the house attached to her laptop so it is always on wi-fi. It was only plugged in to ethernet when it was setup yonks ago. If it wants to update as she goes to bed she leaves it on the table to do its own thing, and that is what she did. So what happened?
Data, TV and phone all come into the modem. The broadband then goes via ethernet to the router, the router then sends wi-fi signals to the laptop. The laptop picks up the signal and all is fine. However, with M's setup there was a problem between the ethernet ports on the modem and router and the router was telling us lies, it was ill, the router was not getting data from the modem so its wi-fi signal was therefore blank, empty. All that was happening with the laptop was that it was getting an empty signal. It was the second hard reset on the router that did the trick. So M is now about to receive a new wi-fi router modem from Virgin.
The moral of the story? Don't always blame MicroSoft updates for everything, there are a few occasions when things are not their fault.... rare, but thy do happen. All my cursing and swearing about them during the above problem was wasted blue air.
