[PLUG-TALK] Designating a repair helper, fixing laptop wifi

Keith Lofstrom keithl at gate.kl-ic.com
Sat Nov 29 18:26:22 UTC 2014


I previously wrote about losing friend Steve.  Steve had
a well planned computer setup for his home, serving his
wife and cats and rabbits.  Steve designated me assistant
fixit guy, and I fixed a couple of things for him and his
wife Becky as he lost the capability and energy to take 
care of his own digital needs.  The most recent one was
fixing DNS on his work laptop (Win7, sigh) so it would
connect properly to his home network.

Of course, soon after he passed his wife's laptop began
to behave strangely, and over the past few days she has
had a difficult time using the internet.  The obvious
suspects was WinVista and a weak 900 MHz single core
Celeron, but it worked properly my own wired network
(as properly as Vista ever manages, sigh).  Wireless
behaved poorly.

On a hunch, I opened it, removed the wireless card,
cleaned the connections with a pencil eraser, reformed
one of the tiny antenna connectors with tweezers, and
put it back together with the cables properly dressed.
It seemed like a 20% chance of success - the machine
still had the weak processor and OS - but it cleared up
the immediate problem and works OK for Becky. 

Sadly, I did not get the opportunity to replace the
hard drive with Mint Linux, with the old OS running
as a virtual guest, but one thing at a time, Becky
has a lot to think about right now.

There are two lessons here - those of you getting
old, eating crap food, or sometimes driving a little
too fast (me, me, me), with sysadmin responsibilities
for your family, should make arrangements for someone
to manage your systems if you unexpectedly get called
to the Great Data Center In The Sky. 

Not me;  when Becky is ready for Yet Another Change I
will introduce her to my own designated replacement.


Second lesson - when the weather changes, moisture gets
into connectors and furnace motor start/stops get into
home wiring. 

If gold-plated connectors start looking brown/dull
instead of yellow/shiny, that is the copper migrating
through the plating and making a harder alloy and more
oxidizable alloy.  Harder means that mating surfaces
do not scrape each other a few atoms deep to form a
metal-to-metal surface, and higher electrical resistance
results.  Cleaning the connectors with a pencil eraser
is a temporary fix (though it takes off more gold than
copper).  Unless I can find some easy/cheap way to 
restore the gold, she will need a new wifi card soon.

Furnace motor?  That's harder, involves rewiring.
Power comes into your house on two phases, and your
breaker box has breakers on the "black" phase and on
the "red" phase".  Have an electrician furnace motors
and refrigerators on one phase and the power outlets
driving your computers on the other.  More expediently,
make sure your desktop/server computer has a good power
supply, not the cheapass junk with dried-out capacitors
that came in the box 10 years ago.

And try to get all this stuff fixed and working for
your family, because it may break soon after you do.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com



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