Five hours later

Warning: geek topic for self-reference.

A chore I saved for the end of the afternoon was to move the wireless router to the same room as the desktop machine. This allows us to do one-stop troubleshooting and to be extra green (and secure) by powering everything down at the end of the day. Going to take under an hour, right?

Right?

Yeah, right.

Once again, the culprit is our new HP printer. When I installed it, I followed the path of least resistance (it seemed) and selected the option of connecting the printer via a USB2 port. Nice but. The first but is that the printer is as possessive of its assigned port as a two-year-old is of a blanket. Second, XP does not care for printers being connected via USB2 ports and it too can become sulky.

I made a space for the router, decided which outlet to use, tested the phone line, and moved the router. That took about 15 minutes. Unfortunately, I had also to change CAT5 cables to a new and shorter one. That meant I had to disconnect the printer cable—because my fingers are too large to change CAT5 cables on this machine unless I unplug the adjacent USB2 cables.

This is the point at which I expected the printer to have the sulks. I was not disappointed. HP 6400 series printers come with built-in troubleshooting, but the troubleshooting logic doesn't function well in the case of a cable disconnection. Two reboots later, I had persuaded the troubleshooter that the printer was indeed connected.

Then I turned my attention to XP, and to persuading it that this was the same printer it has happily hosted for several months, and not some strange piece of hardware implanted by aliens.

In fairness, I did interrupt the process to cook and eat supper, so the time was probably more like 3 1/2 hours. Bruised and bloodied as I am, I'm emboldened to attempt the next step, which is changing to a wireless configuration. In theory, it should avoid these pitfalls.

Hmm...I seem to remember a Far Side cartoon that touched on this subject.