I’ve spent much of the last week (evening wise) fixing PCs for people. My neighbours had a total-refusal-to-boot situation (loose RAM), and MarkyB wondered what it meant when ‘Windoze takes 1/4 hour to boot’ and ‘keeps complaining about corrupt files’ (that would be a very old hard drive becoming deceased), but the worst of all was a pretty straightforward (so it would seem) load of XP and install wireless card.

All was going OK up to the point where the card kept reporting insufficent resources- it was a cardbus (ie: laptop) card in one of those adapter slot thingies- which, after a very very long period of tarting about, got fixed by a BIOS upgrade- oh, and another reinstall of Windoze. Still, at least when I went round to give it back and secure the wireless router, I discovered a wide open access point just up the road, so if I feel the need to become a spammer or other blackhat IT type, I’m laughing. Must buy a car power adapter for the laptop.

The shocking bit was that it was easier (much easier) to connect to the other parties’ AP than the legitimate one, until I changed the wireless channel away from the default setting. Yep, these people have a out-of-the-box router.