Connection Lost
Technology is a right pain in the arse.
Not long after getting it, I had to disable the 5GHz wireless channel on my router because every couple of weeks I would wake up and discover that my phone and laptop were unable to connect to the internet, yet all my other devices could. The only way I could fix this was by resetting the router, but the issue would soon present itself again. It turns out my phone and laptop were the only devices that used the 5GHz band, and everything else was on the 2.4GHz one. So I disabled 5GHz on the router and all my devices have been fine since.
Whereas that was a battle that lasted a couple of months, there has been one that has been going on for two years.
When I bought my PC, I opted to get a Wireless Card installed to cover the event where the location I wanted my PC to be was too far from the router to have a wired connection. If I was going to get another PC, I'd do it again - choice is better than no choice.
My current setup is that my router lives downstairs and my PC sits upstairs almost directly above it. To have a proper wired connection would mean either rolling a long ethernet cable up the staircase and then around a bunch of door frames to avoid a tripping hazard, but it would also mean a long cable would be visible and I don't want that. I could drill a big hole that follows a similar path and pass the cable through it, but I don't own a drill.
Third option - and the one I went with - is a powerline adapter. An ethernet cable is plugged into the router which then goes into an adapter in a nearby socket. Then the PC has an ethernet cable plugged into another adapter which is paired to the first one, and the adapters trick the electric in the house into becoming a network.
The problem with this is that it isn't entirely reliable - YouTube videos will sometimes stop to buffer, and attempting to load another tab in the browser will declare that I have no internet connection. After clearing out some enemies in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, I was booted out to the front end since my connection to the server was lost even though I was playing in a single player session hosted on my own machine (I then found out I had to clear out the enemies again and promptly uninstalled the game).
Even my own command line project turns against me.
I have written a small project that allows me to create new C# projects using boilerplate code that I have built up, so I'm not doing all the boring stuff again and can jump straight into coding new stuff. Except it turns out that using the 'dotnet new' command on a project template that uses a NuGet package will try to install the NuGet package from the server instead of bothering with the local cache that builds up and eats storage from every NuGet package that has ever been installed.
What my PC is supposed to do is use the Wireless Card as a backup for when the powerline adapter randomly decides it doesn't want to work. And it is definitely random - a few times it seemed to correspond to when the heating came on, but then it continued to happen once the heating had been turned off for the summer.
The symbol on the PC changes from the wired connection to the Wi-Fi icon, but still the browser will insist I have no internet connection even though the details shown when hovering over the Wi-Fi icon says I am connected to the network, and there is an internet connection.
I've tried troubleshooting this many times, and like all Windows troubleshooters, it always says there is nothing wrong even though there clearly is.
Sometimes the Wi-Fi does work, but more often than not it doesn't.
Although, after 2 years of putting up with this, I have just discovered that even though my PC is doing what I want it to do and switches over to the wireless network when the wired one loses internet connection, it does not let other applications know about the wireless network as long as the wired connection is still enabled.
When I completely disabled the wired connection after it lost internet access, suddenly everything came to life and was able to access the internet through the Wi-Fi. My PC is intuitive enough to know when the internet is or isn't available, but not intuitive enough to tell applications to swap to the connection that is available.
So Microsoft, what is the point in the local NuGet cache if you aren't going to use it? There's 8GB on my drive you have decided to store packages in, so why don't you look in there before trying to see what is available online?
Also if my Wi-Fi says that I have internet connection, why don't you make that accessible to any application that requests it instead of referring them to the wired connection that does not have internet access?
Weirdly enough, this has hardly happened since I drafted this post. I did wake up to find that I had lost internet completely on Tuesday morning though as the broadband had gone down for the second time in two months, which really sucked because the main project I'm working on needs me to research things.
