Mac Woes

I did some work for a friend of mine, the church's choir director, today. I worked on her home wireless network. It would have been fairly simple: wireless router on first floor to iMac with Airport on second floor. Except that her grandson disconnected the cable modem to router connection and hooked it indirectly through another router so that he could get online without waiting for me to finish. I didn't realize it — since the cable modem is actually another floor down and linked by a long ethernet cable — until I had spent probably an hour pulling my hair out.

The grandson had important things to do. Like downloading pirated copies of Zone Alarm Pro, Office and Fahrenheit 9/11 off the new cable connection. sigh

Then Airport wasn't working. Turned out the grandson, who hates Macs, had installed it. He forgot to hook up the internal iMac antennae to the Airport card. I only caught that when I had to remove the card to get the S/N for AppleCare support. I think the technician was glad to see she didn't have to solve the problem for me.

Then the cable modem lost its signal again, thanks to a weak signal. Charter said they'd send out a tech on Friday.

Interspersed there was a lot of time locating and downloading updates — when things were working — onto my PowerBook and then burning them and putting them on the iMac. If Airport had just been installed correctly things would have been way easier: just launch Software Update and get the new Airport and Mac OS updates. But, in the end the computer moved up to OS 9.2 from 9.0 and I convinced my friend that despite the fact that her grandchildren were nagging her to get a PC and that the church office is standardized on XP, that she really wasn't foolish for wanting to stay on Macs.

Now if only the church office would find a budget for a new PowerBook for her…