Last weekend we visited my girlfriends brothers who bought a new computer last year but have never been able to get it connected to the internet. It’s common in many flats in Denmark that the building has it’s own internet connection that is then shared amongst the flats; basically creating a LAN in the building. It’s fast, cheap and if it fails then it’s not your problem to fix.

I was trying to get a connection (they have Vista Home Premium) but all it kept saying was that the LAN connection could not be identified. I tried every possible fix but nothing would get me a valid IP address. Her brother told me that they had been warned that the buildings LAN didn’t work with Vista and they should get a router to connect through so they had bough one just in case.

Sure enough as soon as I connected the router everything worked without a hitch, they router was assigned an IP address and the router gave out an IP address to the computer.

The sheer fact they they were forced to spend money on a router that should be totally unnecessary amazes me. It basically means that everyone in their building buying a new computer will have to also buy a router, unbelievable!

This exercise in futility also made me think more about carrying around a bootable USB with some Linux distribution installed, or maybe a Linux Live CD to be used for testing and diagnostic tasks. One of the problems I had was that I couldn’t easily tell if the problem lay with Vista or maybe there was no internet connection at all. If I could have booted into Linux I could have easily diagnosed the problem and been sure it was with Vista from the start.