HP Pavilions Gone Mad!

For the first time in many weeks, I took some time just for me. After completing a number of my daily tasks work-wise, I opted to head out to check out Lummi Island located just outside of Bellingham, WA.

We (some friends of mine and myself) spent the better part of four hours exploring and checking out local attractions on the island. Needless to say, it was a great way to spend a few spare hours on a bright and sunny day.

Then it was time to come back home and get back to reality. The most recent item on the agenda was to see what happened to my mom’s PC. Yes, I am most certainly not too proud or too busy to take a little time for the person who brought me into the world in the first place. So being on call once in a while is a no brainer.

After a careful inspection, everything appeared to be spot-on with regard to the network connection itself. It simply refused to connect. I looked at the IP Stack, repairing the connection, disabling the firewall for troubleshooting, checked and reset the router, checked and reset the cable modem, checked to see if it was a DNS issue or a true connectivity problem, disabling/re-enabling the NIC, seeing if my laptop connected via both WiFi and ethernet, verified that we were getting a new IP address after a release/renew both on and off the LAN, the list goes on. Needless to say, I have seen this once before - on another HP Pavilion.

As bizarre as this will sound, I have had one other instance where this exact some problem took place in a similar model of Pavilion. To this day, I never did figure out what had happened. With that previous instance, I simply chose to install another NIC from the get go as I found little reward in chasing this sort of problem down. Understand that I did verify that both the OS was OK as well as the hardware itself. Whatever that issue was at the time, I simply did not wish to spend the better part of the day chasing it down.

So this brings us back to my mom’s Pavilion. If anyone out there can figure out what the deal is, I’d love to know. Tomorrow I will be heading over to the house and at that time, fully plan on doing away with their existing NIC. I am a busy guy these days, and the thought of tinkering with a strange NIC problem just doesn’t seem as enticing as it once did. Perhaps it is a change of interests. And perhaps instead, it is simply my brain waking up from a deep slumber. After all, there are better things to do with a person’s time than chase down random errors .