a steampunk moment

[sergebroom]

I have a laptop provided by my employer so that I can support our system from the comfort of home at all hours, ungodly and ungodly. I normally plug in thru a cable, but there are times when I take the laptop to the living-room, in which case I connect to the system thru my home's WiFi. (I'm so proud that I managed to set that up.) This week though, whenever I tried to connect, my laptop would say that there was no wireless network around (which wasn't true) and that I should make sure that the wireless switch was on. After poking around the various softwares, and finding no such switch, I called tech support last night. After a 30-minute wait listening to a voice breathlessly telling me that serving me was very important and that somebody would get to me as soon as possible, I finally got a live human to talk to. After 15 minutes of scratching our heads, I found the switch.

It's an actual switch hidden on the thin front side.
A physical switch.
In this day and age.
That was quite a steampunk moment.

As for why the laptop has a switch to interrupt wireless communications, I have no idea.

Comments

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think the software only turns off the programs -- the radio itself needs to be physically turned off to save even more power. ;-)

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... So there was a valid reason for this switch after all. Still, how much power does the radio use up, compared to the flat screen?