How Windows 7 Troubleshooters Saved My Day

Now this is kind of an embarrassing story, but I’ll tell it anyway :) – After having promoted the troubleshooting engine in Windows 7 in front of my customers for quite some time, I had never thought I would be using them myself, but sometimes the solution is just too obvious to find.

I was in my hotel room, stuck with a single ethernet connection to the outside world (no wireless...), but two notebooks that I needed (well, OK, wanted, but that’s not the point) to connect concurrently.

THAT problem was easily remediated – I just set up Internet Connection Sharing (ICS), thus transforming my little netbook into a part-time wireless access point.

The next day, I completely forgot about this abuse I put that poor machine through and took it along to a technology conference I was attending. Strangely, the machine stubbornly refused to connect up with the conference’s wireless network. Well, it connected OK, but no internet access...

After mucking around for some time, I went into the Network and Sharing Center and hit the “Troubleshoot problems” link with not much hope for success – and quickly received the result that DHCP was off on the wireless connection, complete with a cute little link “fix this problem”. Talk about slapping your own forehead – that had of course been a side product of ICS.

Now, OF COURSE I would have found this myself eventually :) but is was still impressive how effective the troubleshooters are for finding common networking issues.