As I said in a previous post, I recently started a new job. On my first day on the job, I was told to pick out a laptop from one of the online vendors. I spent a day or two doing various research, until I picked out the laptop that I thought would be right. I tried as best as I could to plan for obsolescence, picking out a dual-core processor with 2.2Ghz and 3 Gigs of RAM. Actually, the first laptop I picked out, just as I was compiling the order numbers, turned out to come with XP Pro. I went looking for another one with Windows Vista, as part of my hedge against the possible obsolescence. A brand new high powered laptop could be dragging it's butt and out of hard disk space in 3 to 4 years. It's not likely, but possible. I'll never forget the feeling of getting a relatively new Gateway Pentium III 500 Mhz only to find in less than 3 years that the hard drive crashed because I filled all 10 Gigs of it.
After waiting for several weeks, my laptop arrived today, late this afternoon. I had time to connect the Toshiba docking station and monitor and start the laptop up before the end of the workday, so I did what any good employee would do: I took it home with me to work on this weekend. I have to remove all of the crapware and install some of my utilities, and get Vista tweaked just right.
When I got home, I wanted to set the new laptop up on my wireless network so I could start downloading useful utilities and updates, like SP1. That's when I ran into problems. For the life of me, I could not get the wireless to activate. I easily could have plugged the laptop into my LAN, but why do that when you're supposed to have working wireless? The F8 key has a wireless symbol on it, so I kept pressing Function+F8, and a map of the function keys kept coming down from the top of the screen saying something about enabling the wireless switch. I thought that's what F8 did. I did a search and came across this: http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsid=2297. Apparently there is a physical switch on the front of the laptop near the card reader. Doh! I turned that switch and it found my network.
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