There's more than one solution to a common wireless problem
Life would be so much simpler if each problem we face had a single solution.
Of course, "simple" and "computer" are two words you rarely find in close proximity, except when you hear someone say, "My life would be so simple if I didn't own a computer."
For about two weeks, my notebook computer balked at linking to my wireless router. It would eventually connect, taking its own sweet time about it. Vista's Network and Sharing Center showed that Windows was struggling to acquire a network address.
A quick Web search indicated that I wasn't the only one experiencing this problem. One forum described three different solutions to the glitch: re-enter your network's encryption key; delete your network place and recreate it with a new name; and update or replace your wireless adapter.
Other forum posters suggested starting the DHCP client service, cloning the MAC address, changing the DHCP IP to the same setting as the wireless router, even disabling TCP/IP (I don't recommend this technique). I knew I was going nowhere when someone seriously suggested buying a longer ethernet cable.
If you're using Windows XP with Service Pack 2, there's a special patch for this problem, though it may have been installed on your system as part of an automatic Windows update. Of course, this wasn't going to do my Vista notebook any good.
What struck me was that these very different solutions all worked for somebody, but not everybody. What ultimately worked for my laptop was doing nothing. Yesterday I booted the machine and was pleasantly surprised to see right off the bat the network icon in the system tray show the little blue bubble in the bottom-right corner indicating that the Internet was there waiting for me.
So what's the moral of the story? I guess it's that two people can experience the same problem but require different solutions. Or maybe that some problems may indeed go away if you ignore them.
For me, the moral is, "Don't believe everything you read in tech forums."
Dennis O'Reilly has covered PCs and other technologies in print and online since 1985. Along with more than a decade as editor for Ziff-Davis's Computer Select, Dennis edited PC World's award-winning Here's How section for more than seven years. He is a member of the CNET blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. 
