So I get woken up this morning by my mother, around 9am. Not being a morning person, my reaction to her words is, at first, "mrf?"
So she repeats herself. "There's a problem with the computer."
"Mrf?" (We have five computers. And I was still, at that point, more asleep than awake.)
"You know, the computer that connects to the internet and shares it."
Ah. The old and ailing Frankencomputer. "Mrfphghlwrong with it?"
"Oh, your father went to turn it on this morning and it was making a lot of noise and it wouldn't find the operating system, so he opened it up and saw the noise was coming from the hard drive, so he took that one out and put another one in and now the computer is doing fine, but it won't connect to the internet or see the network or anything. Can you come downstairs and fix it?"
Still more asleep than awake, but now a sense of impending doom and of "I'll most likely have to spend the day sorting this out, so much for getting other things done today" is starting to get at me. "Mkay, let me sleep another little bit so I'm more awake and then I'll go downstairs and see what I can do."
Now, at this point, from the description of the problem my mother had given, what would you think had happened? I was guessing at:
- Main HD go boom (that particular computer has two) - got replaced and the OS reinstalled, but all settings etc are gone
- Perhaps some other damaged internal bits, especially because of the not connecting to the internet or to the network part
So I roll over and doze another hour or so, then crawl downstairs to see what's up. What I find is the Frankencomputer in perfect working order, with all settings etc. still there, the desktop looking exactly like it did when I turned it off last night, the only thing "wrong" with it being that the cover is still off.
o_O Okay... I sit down at it, and my father offers, "let me tell you what I've done so far."
"Sure..."
"When I turned it on this morning it was making a grinding sound and it wouldn't find the OS. So I opened it, and determined the grinding sound was coming from the second HD" - insert mental facepalm from me at this point - "so I turned off the computer, and replaced that with a spare HD, and now it works perfectly fine. It connects to the internet fine" - mental facepalm x2 - "but it won't see any other computer on the network, and the other computers can't see it either, so no other computer can get on the internet."
Ok, that sounds like an actual problem I can try and solve. "Can the other computers see each other on the network?"
"No."
Mental facepalm x3. Get up, go to where the network switch is, fiddle with the cables a bit - one had somehow gotten loose - unplug and replug some cables - hey, look, the network works again. Odd that.
If only all problems were this easy to solve...