I got sick of not being able to connect to the Internet from home.

So I rearranged my office/meditation room in order to get my tower closer to the phone jack. I removed the long phone extension. I removed the splitter. I used a known working phone cord.

Damn – still no joy.

On a lark, I reinstalled my original modem – the one I replaced a few months ago because it wouldn’t work.

That sucked. While trying to put the modem driver CD in, my Polaroid BurnMAX48 decided to crash my entire operating system. (This is after I spent about six minutes trying to get the tray to open with various small sharp objects.)

After a reboot, the CD-ROM worked fine, the “Windows found new hardware” wizard worked fine, and the installation went well.

Then I selected the new (er, old) modem in DUN and dialled up.

…and I’m connected at 44-motherfucking-K for the first time in months. I’ve been connected now for a whopping 6 minutes with no errors. What the flying fuck was the point of THIS whole exercise?

I’m sick of this desktop, btw. I want another laptop. Having to rearrange an entire room just to test another jack is absurd. Anybody wanna trade me a used laptop for a very slightly used 264MB/40GB CD-R CD-RW desktop, complete with two NIC cards, two USB cards, and two modems?