Yesterday afternoon–about 26 hours ago, now, internet connectivity here at twc central went south again. *sigh* About 2.5 good weeks of decent service and… kablooey!
Yeh, yeh, I walked completely through the troubleshooting tree with the voice-prompt call-in (even though I had the process memorized long, long ago). No, that didn’t help. Yes, the first thing on calling in was a recorded message saying my ISP was experiencing an unusually large call volume from my area. No, according to the supposed customer service reps I eventually reached, there was no outage (then why the swamping with calls such that it took 7 hours before I could actually reach a live person?). No, going through the troubleshooting tree with a live person resulted in no different result than doing it with the automated process or on my own.
Nor did changing out the “modem” (cable “modems” are NOT modems; they are specialty routers–very, very different technology to a modem). Heck, in the process of many, many reboots of this computer as a part of the multiple efforts I made to comply with “support’s” requests, my primary hard drive scrambled Windows boot process to the point that the Win7 repair Environment wouldn’t. Repair it, that is. (S’all right, really. I had a spare hard drive I had really meant to install it on but because of a lapse of memory had failed to, so another easy-peasy quick fresh install from upgrade media onto a bare drive. *heh*)
Fresh install of Win7 (and yes, I had tried using Ubuntu and Puppy Linux to connect, as well–as well as attempting to connect directly to the cable “modem” with other computers) and still no connectivity. Went through yet another ineffective t-shooting process (which, BTW, included power cycling both the modem and the computer attached to it), called in again and got a sweet lil idjit who informed me that my modem had been “Online for the past 15 hours.” 15 hours during which I had power cycled it several times, had changed it out for another modem, etc.
Riiiight. Went through the t-shooting tree one more time and… magically, it worked this time. Not. While lying to me aboiut my modem having been active and online for the past 15 hours, the lil idjit reset on her end. At least, that’s the best I can figure from here, since I KNOW information I’ve received from my ISP over the past 24 hours (heck, the past 6 months) has been… suspect, at the very best.
It’d just be nice if–just once–instead of playing CYA even one person would say, “Oops! Our bad. We screwed you up. Sorry.”
Meanwhile, since Lovely Daughter and her fiance were going to be out “shopping for cake” (Gee, some sheet cake and a couple lil cakes, one for bride and one–if that–for groom. What’s the stinking big deal? Wedding cake all tastes like sugar-soaked cardboard, anyway… ), he let my Wonder Woman use his network/internet connection to take her mid-term for one of her grad school classes while I shoveled his drive and did some shopping of my own. 😉 (Yeh, didn’t have to shovel his drive, but since Lovely Daughter had borrowed my 35-year-old snow shovel–hey! another 65 years and it’ll be an antique!–I figured, why not?)
OK, was back on, but flaky connection. Poked around and changed some settings in my router and have been able to have a more stable connection. Why those settings were fine for the past few weeks but suddenly needed changing… no, it can’t be because the ISP has changed anything (since nothing on my end had changed in that time), surely not. *feh* ISP recently: always waiting until something’s NOT broken to “fix” things.