Oh, Sweet Internet!
Oh thank goodness for that. I have internet access again. I wasn’t quite sure how I could live without checking my emails for a few hours!
On Sunday night my ISP had router problems, which meant I was offline for most of the evening. Tried logging on this evening and low and behold, my own router decided not to work. After half an hours faffing, I finally persuaded to get it to reset back to factory settings - quite why the reset button didn’t work for 20 minutes before hand, well I can’t tell you.
But even that only gave me connectivity between my two PCs - internet connections were woefully absent.
So I attempted to re-set up the router with my ISP settings, except my username/password combination just wouldn’t work. Knowing full well that the password was correct, didn’t stop me trying several other passwords, and constantly waiting for the router to reboot and re-initialise.
Finally I gave up and dug out the old modem cables and did it the hard way via 55.6k modem. Except that there was a snag. Neither of my two PCs had ISP settings for the non-broadband setup.
Take my advice - always have your ISP’s backup 0845 number handy! Cos if you don’t, you might end up like me, frantically searching through discs trying to find a free ISP. Which is why I ended up trying a five year old version of FreeUK’s online signup procedure, and finding it failed. More frantic searching and I found a three year old Tiscalli signup programme on a PC Plus coverdisk. Nice snag from Tiscalli - it didn’t seem to actually allow you to sign up anywhere. But did give you a link to their members section in case you were an existing user.
This is a programme for new users to join Tiscalli and there’s no signup link? Eh? WTF?
Thankfully when you clicked on the members link, it just took you to a Tiscalli portal page, complete with search box! Hurrah! One type of plus.net into the Google box and I was away, getting my connection settings from my ISP. And lo, the logon details I had been entering were wrong because I wasn’t putting ‘@plusdsl.net’ on the end of my username.
After one brief moment of dispair when I put .com instead of .net by accident, and I finally got online again. Only took 90 minutes… Depressingly given I was completely knackered and had been considering going to bed at 22:30. Which is why it’s now 23:00 and I’m blogging about this whole lot of fun…
Have your say