Dead ethernet
Friday DirecTV DSL went dead in my parents' house. Saturday night, after Shabbos, I went over. I systematically disassembled most of the networking infrastructure, and redid it. I put in the MR-314, hooked it to the cable modem, set up everyone's wires, and it all finally worked.
Today I went and got a new ethernet card for Ezra's PC. I went to Computer Builder's Warehouse, and found the cheapest card they had, a CNet Pro200. I came home, dropped the card into the computer, started up, and Windows said, "Nice card. Where's the driver?" I was hoping that Win2K would recognize the card without needing the driver floppy that came with it.
That's a problem. The computer is an eMachines that we're trying to keep working despite its general funkiness. The floppy drive didn't work when we got it, and even putting in a new drive didn't help. For what we know the floppy drive controller chip is shot. The main hard drive was glued to a bracket and mounted vertically, and we didn't have the cabling to hook it up. So we have a 40-gig hard drive shoved into the floppy bracket (a very tight fit), and two optical drives to fill the bays.
I went back to my parents house, and borrowed my brother's PC for just two minutes to copy the contents of the floppy to a CD. Done, I made it back home to load the driver. Finally, I got the thing up and running.
So where do I stand after all of this? Now I have more junk to sit around the house. First, I have a fried 3Com EtherLink. Second, I have a DirecTV DSL modem that is useless to anyone, since it has custom firmware that will only work on the defunct network (although there are some ISPs who are faking out the boxes to make them work). Third, I have a huge 12-port 10Base-T hub with a fan that is terribly loud. And finally, I have a first-generation Apple AirPort Base Station that works perfectly and has never given me any trouble.
What do I do with all this?