Techno-jail

At the cottage, we use our iPhone hotspots to access the internet. This works pretty well, except on summer long weekends or when it’s raining, when everybody and their progeny piles on to the cellphone tower. Are there other options to reach the world wide web? Kind of, but suboptimal for heavily wooded islands. But that’s a topic for another day.

A couple of weeks ago, my laptop stopped recognizing my hotspot. On the Wednesday night it was working perfectly fine. On the Thursday morning it went on strike. The thing about having no internet access is it makes it impossible to go online to find out about why a laptop might stop talking to a hotspot. I did eventually beg and borrow some juice to interrogate Mr. Google about why a hotspot might stop working. This is what he told me to try:

1. Delete the hotspot from the list of available internet connections and add it again. Apparently not the problem.
2. Restart both the laptop and the phone. Mr. Google clearly thinks he’s working with an amateur, here. That’s the first thing I did. Didn’t solve anything.
3. Change the hotspot password. Is he nuts? How could that possibly be the problem. My hotspot works fine with the other computer. It must be the laptop.
4. Update the phone’s iOS. My operating system is completely up to date. It just installed an update last week. Moving on.
5. Update Windows. That just happened a week or so ago too. I remember it because I was shutting down to pack up and the helpful message told me I needed to wait while an update finished installing. For ten minutes.
6. Change the hotspot name. Seriously? It doesn’t like its name? What’s wrong with iPhone Marilyn? I’m not changing it.
7. Run network troubleshooting. Okay. That can’t hurt. I did as asked and the helpful result was that there’s a problem with accessing my hotspot.
8. Reset the IP setting. This is done via the command line and I dutifully typed in the instructions (netsh winsock reset, netsh int IP reset, IP config/release, IP config renew, IP config /flushdns – in case you wanted to know). The result: “The requested operation requires elevation. Run as an administrator.” There seems to be no way to sign on as an administrator of my own laptop without getting Bill Gates involved. Next?
9. Return the phone to factory settings. No, no, no, and no.

But I still needed to get online to conduct my business (and spend too much time on cyber crosswords), so maybe a new phone would solve things. The helpful guy at Costco said all I needed to do is put my old phone beside the new phone and it would magically transfer all the info and photos instantly. That’s basically how it worked, and in almost less than half a day (download and update iOS on new phone, remove all the useless apps Apple believes are vital to my daily life, refuse countless solicitations to buy more iCloud space) I had a functional new phone. And hopefully a functional hotspot.

I booted up my laptop with great anticipation. The hotspot dutifully showed up in my list of connections, beckoning seductively but still playing hard to get. Must not have been the phone. Went back to Costco to buy a new laptop, because if it’s not the phone it must be the laptop. Spent the rest of the day initializing and transferring files to the new laptop. Then the moment of truth: can it access the hotspot? No, of course it can’t.

I went back to Mr. Google’s list. Change the hotspot password, he said. Ridiculous, I said. But the password wasn’t exactly the most secure – iphone123456789 and it’s an easy thing to change, so I did. I went back to the new laptop and held my breath while it attempted to shake hands with the hotspot. And it worked. After spending only a few thousand dollars on new hardware.

Just out of curiosity, I fired up the old laptop. I entered the new password for the hotspot and after a brief pause to say “I told you so” it connected like a charm. Spent the rest of the day scrubbing the new laptop back to its in-the-box-self and returned it. The end.