File under 7 impossible things before breakfast…

I ran into an interesting problem yesterday when my laptop suddenly stopped connecting to the office network. It could see the connection, but never got an IP address. It’s a fairly new machine, but had been working fine for about 2 weeks prior to this. 2 hours of troubleshooting yielded only frustration and I resolved myself to using Ethernet at work.

At the end of the day, I unplugged my external monitor… and the wireless connected almost immediately. Huh? I plugged the monitor back in and the connection died. Seriously? Then I remembered, I had bought a new monitor connector to run the external monitor with the new powerbook. It’s cheap and probably unshielded. After a quick Internet search, I figured out that the monitor interference was making a hash of my connection. I switched the channel on the wireless network and it connected just fine with the external monitor attached.

The long and short of this is that when it comes to computers, the obvious issue is often cause by something that appears totally unrelated. Actually… I think we can pretty much say that about everything.