Chrystal came down this evening to say that her laptop would not connect to the Internet. Sorting out computers is supposed to be my bread and butter so I said I would take a look

I had conveniently forgotten that her laptop runs Vista and my total experience of Vista is about 30 minutes. Fortunately about 15 of those minutes were spent setting up the network connection in the first place so I was in with a chance.

I tried the obvious stuff like the little switch on the side that turns networking on and off, and looking in Device Manager to see if the network card could be found. Everything looked OK but it just could not find a network even when I was only two feet away from the router. I even tried putting the network key/password back in again. Windows help suggested some DOS command which I tried and the computer kept telling me it was typed wrong, even after I double- and triple-checked it.

It was looking to me like a hardware failure in the networking card, because everything was fine when I plugged an ethernet cable in, but at that point I noticed the battery was getting low so I gave up and told Chrys to plug it in upstairs. I also asked her if she had tried turning it off and back on again, using the accent from The IT Crowd, because she loves that programme.

Apparently it went wrong yesterday and had been off overnight, so that wasn’t going to work.

At this point I decided to check the Dell website’s support section and I found a specific mention of problems with their Intel network cards. Brilliant – a known problem! I love known problems because it often means there is a known solution. Apparently these cards can totally lock up in use and be impervious to even the network switch or FN-F2 but it can all be fixed by updating the drivers for the card.

A temporary fix is – of course – to turn the computer off and on again. I went up to get the computer and when I turned it on it came on suspiciously quickly after some message about waking up. It turns out that the off button on the laptop does not actually turn it off but only puts it to sleep. As soon as it came on I turned it off properly and then when I fired it up again all was well, so I updated the driver for good measure.

Chrystal was quite pleased with a practical demonstration that the IT Crowd is actually based on fact and not just a silly show.