And Then A Mysterious Occurrence….

It’s been hot today – drought warnings tomorrow?

The laptop?  Non-running Wlan.Autoconfig?  It was collected Friday morning for return to base, repair(?) and return. I didn’t touch him all through Thursday.

Come Thursday evening I was going to put him back in his box ready for collection.  It transpired this was a pointless exercise as I had to rip him out again as he had to travel in his own ‘special’ box. Where was I? Right, I thought, one last power-up?  Why not. Can’t hurt and it’s been a while.

Here we go then. Power up, click on the Network icon; Networks available. Nothing new there, been there a thousand times this week.  Open Services, scroll down to Wlan.Autoconfig.  

The first thing that popped into my head was, that can’t be right.  Rub eyes, screwed them up and moved face closer to the screen.  Blinked several times to confirm focus, looked again then  drifted sedately into full-on weeping mode. Automatic start-up.

Wlan.Autoconfig, for the first time in, what, two weeks and thousands of starts, had run automatically, as it should. Click on my connection, tick for automatic log-on, connect, open a browser and guess what?  Brows away!!

How can this be? I had no idea Windows had a Magic Mending App. One thing’s obvious, if it has such an app and I can find it, I need to move that slider thingy on the Delay Before Doing Magic Mend waaay over to the left.

{Isn’t that a computer gripper?  The progress bar?  Moves along, announces one second to go, gets to the end, announces it’s complete then sits there for another thirty minutes!}

Anyhoo, it’s not going to work again, right? Put to sleep, wake; running, auto logged in and good to go. I spent the next two hours doing every method of shutdown and start possible – many times each.  And? Absolutely faultless operation.  Next morning, same thing. Perfect operation, or what passes for perfect with computers.

With minutes to spare I amended my Fault Facts file and printed it ready to voyage to the workshop with the beast. Yup, he’s still going but what the techs will find I have no idea.

All I can do now is wait for their report. Most likely a blank sheet of A4.  That, in fact, will be preferable to something along the lines of, “Once we pressed that really, really big button next to the Power button – the big button marked in really, really big letters, ’Press To Enable Wlan.Autoconfig Automatic Start In The Future’ everything ran perfectly, or what passes for perfectly with computers.”

Quote;  Elayne Boosler.

“I am thankful the most important key in history was invented. It's not the key to your house, your car, your boat, your safety deposit box, your bike lock or your private community. It's the key to order, sanity, and peace of mind. The key is 'Delete'.”