Occasionally we would get a pop-up saying "Internet connectivity problem." I called tech support at the phone company that provides the Internet. The guy had me hook up the laptop directly to the DSL modem and it still had the problem. Could hear the audio stopping and starting as I tried to play a video. That eliminated the router as the problem. Was wondering if it might be the laptop as it is 6 years since I bought it and it was a refurbished one at that. Borrowed another computer and it worked fine. Tried the laptop again in case the phone company had fixed the problem. Laptop still wasn't working right.
Then I thought maybe the dongle plugged into one of the USB ports might have something to do with the problem. Unplugged it and it seemed to play normally. Then The Old Lady said, "I wonder if the battery is going dead in the wireless mouse?" The wireless mouse is what the dongle is for. Anywho, I replaced the battery in the mouse and plugged the dongle back in while the laptop was playing the episode we had so much trouble trying to watch. It continued to play normally and last night we watched several things on NetFlix with no problem.
What I can't figure out is how the hell a weak battery in a wireless mouse could affect the streaming of stuff from the intratubes??? Like I said in the title of this post, "ELECTRONICS ARE FM, FUCKING MAGIC!!!
I'm guessing the mouse driver times out, because it isn't getting a (complete) reply when polling the mouse, which somehow makes all the I/O stutter. Could be some sort of pathological retry behaviour. I guess nobody thought at the time that a USB mouse could be connected yet unresponsive. Or a disconnect-reconnect cycle causing constant repopulation of the USB device list could certainly cause that, though that would probably have visible effects. It could be hogging the bandwidth of the USB IO chip, etc.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, that actually sounds like (at least some versions of) Windows. E.g. when your hard drive wakes up having been sleeping (power saving), the large part of the I/O system stops (apart from cached data) until the drive has woken up. I think the USB still works, but the filesystem and networking both stop. There's something wrong with the design.
After reading Blind Sniper's reply, I now agree with you. Magic.
ReplyDeleteAt the beginning of the whole home computer explosion, I think IT people got together and said, "We could make it all simple or we could make it so complicated and counterintuitive that we become like doctors or lawyers- specialists that must be worshipped for our magic."
What did he say?
ReplyDeletethe Ol'Buzzard
It could also be a neighbor's wi fi interfering with yours...or, it could be JuJu magic.
ReplyDeletejadedj, the neighbor is on the next forty, so I don't think that's the problem.
ReplyDeleteTHANKS OBAMA
ReplyDelete