Let me introduce you to my computer, a Lenovo laptop that is about three or four years old. It’s amazing how time flies because I didn’t think it was that old. My reason for buying the damn thing was me deciding that I’d like to pretend to be a writer, author, blogger, or something. At least I’ve been pretty successful at sticking with it because I’m still writing and posting. My computer at the time was some derelict desktop PC that was about ten years old at the time. It being a derelict desktop PC meant that it wasn’t portable at all; any writing I wanted to do had to be done in the cold, lonely, dark, and in the summer occasionally flooded basement. It wasn’t very conducive to productive writing that’s for sure. But besides that, the catalyst for “upgrading” (if you could call it that) was this: Google one day sent me an email or a notification stating that Chrome wouldn’t be supported on Windows XP anymore. At that time that I realized that, yes, my PC was old as dirt. I couldn’t deny it anymore.
On my quest to pretend to be a writer the aspect of a shiny, new laptop was also enticing. It could be my multi-hundred dollar “promise” to myself that I would write. It’s hard to not write when you spent $300-400 to do so. And since it was new I’d have even more incentive to write.
I went to newegg.com (I would link to it, but they’re not giving me affiliate money so fuck the small effort required to do so) and searched for the cheapest shit I could find. The one I purchased was about $300 if I recall it correctly. This is not a whole lot for a laptop and the reviews explained why: it was a “low-end” laptop that seemed to have a lower quality build, cheap speakers, low processing power, and basically everything about it was “lower-end.” One review said something like this, “The computer is good for basic work. I bought it for my daughter for college and it’s perfect for simple stuff like note taking.” Sounds perfect for writing huh?
My intentions were to also get a shitty computer so I wouldn’t be tempted to play video games on it. This laptop runs Kerbal Space program and Flight Simulator 2004 (!!!) even slower than the decade-old PC in the basement did. Mission Accomplished I guess.
Hang on. My laptop dropped the WiFi signal again. Let me restart it. Because that’s the only way to fix the problem.
And I’m back. This is what this post is really about: my shitty laptop’s inability to stay connected to WiFi. What happens is this: I take a break from writing to either eat food, use the bathroom, or wander off simply from being distracted. If I’m gone for more than five minutes the WiFi signal is lost and any and all troubleshooting doesn’t fix the problem. It also happens if I close the screen or put it into sleep mode. I usually take these breaks between actually writing a blog post and posting it, and you can imagine the slew of things that can go wrong.
I load the post into WordPress, and WordPress has a “save draft” button that usually works just fine. If the internet is lost though, WordPress does not save a draft despite telling me so. Countless times I’ve hit the “save draft” button, had it tell me that saving the draft was successful, all without having internet; WordPress didn’t save a damn thing. Luckily Google Docs saves changes even offline (and tells you so), so editing posts there doesn’t cause me an issue, and only when I make changes in WordPress do things magically go missing. It is soulcrushingly frustrating to lose a post after you’ve edited the hell out of it.
Making the problem more frustrating is my inability to solve it before the issue occurs. When I’m writing and things are going okay I don’t care about any possible lurking problem about WiFi and internet connectivity. It’s only after things go wrong do I feel the need to solve them. But as stated before, this usually occurs in the middle of uploading a blog post so I usually solve that problem before even giving a damn about the recurring WiFi problem. Also, when you lose internet the first thing you want to do is an internet search to see if anyone else has the problem and what the possible fixes are. Internet out, I want to solve it but can’t search anything because the internet is out. And if the internet works okay? Well, then I don’t care to solve the problem because there is no problem to solve.
Windows PCs are pains-in-the-asses to troubleshoot too. All the customization and freedom that comes with a Windows PC also means troubleshooting is frequently oblique and complex. A few solutions I’ve looked up involved using command prompts and all of that and while I’ve completed a few of them they still haven’t solved the problem. As with everything, it isn’t a major problem that is threatening my writing or blogging in anyway, it’s just frustrating as fuck when I have to shut my computer off anytime I need to leave it for a few minutes. That or restart the damn thing after it drops the WiFi signal.
When I left the computer this time I manually shut off WiFi, and then put it in sleep mode. I turned it back on, and manually turned on WiFi and that seems to have worked. Dammit maybe I do have a fix after all? I just need to shut WiFi off anytime I leave apparently. While that might be clunky as fuck, it sure beats restarting it multiple times while trying to post something. It’s a good PC and serves its writing purpose admirably, but damn is it annoying when it loses internet. And thanks for listening to this utterly pointless rant about my shitty computer.
