I just picked up a USB wifi adapter at Best Buy and installed it. At first I had internet connection but none of the pages would load and it kept kicking me off. Now I’m on it no problem (typing on my DT now, actually). Two questions: Did it have to “warm up” before it started working properly? And: What happens when I turn my computer off?
OK, dumb question: Do you have your own router? Do you, in fact, have your own Internet connection which you pay for?
The USB Wi-Fi adapter doesn’t need to warm up. It should work reliably once you’ve gotten it to work at all, so my first guess is that the Wi-Fi access point you’re connecting to is screwing with your connection, which shouldn’t happen if you have your own Wi-Fi router hooked up to your own Internet connection. Hence the dumb question above.
Once you turn your computer off, it will get quite dark and cold and stop working. Once you turn it on again, it should recognize your USB Wi-Fi adapter and use it to give you a Wi-Fi connection just like before.
No, I’m going off my landlord’s wifi (he gave me permission). It did the same thing earlier. Fought me tooth and nail for about a half hour (twice, actually), saying the server couldn’t be found, etc, and then started working great.
There is nothing in a modern computer that needs to “warm up”.
Windows operating systems lie to you. They come up and make it look like they have completed booting when really they haven’t and they are still loading things behind the scenes (Microsoft wants you to think that it boots faster for some reason). If you try to access the internet your program will hang until Windows finishes loading. Then it should take off and run normally (though sometimes it won’t).
Unless you’ve got something really screwy going on with Windows, it shouldn’t take more than a minute or so after it looks like it has finished booting for it to actually be ready to use. It definitely shouldn’t take half an hour.
Without knowing what was causing your computer to fail to connect, there’s no saying what’s going to happen when you restart it. It may work fine. It might not work at all. It may work after another half an hour. Who knows.
You might have some sort of external source of interference that comes and goes. This could be a microwave oven, a cordless phone, someone’ s baby monitor in a nearby house, something with a motor in it like a hair dryer or a vacuum cleaner (or maybe even an appliance like a washer or a dryer or maybe even a refrigerator), all kinds of things. Maybe even your neighbor’s wifi. If your landlord’s wifi has the capability to use multiple channels, try a different channel and see if that works better.
It’s possible that during the period of perceived unreliability, your computer was downloading and installing fresh drivers for the device - this can result in flaky connectivity (and typically followed by reliable operation).
Or your machine may have been installing other updates (I’ve seen regular Windows updates mess with network connectivity while they are in process).
It might have been that the house had two devices with the same SSID and it was connecting to the wrong one at first ?
Or perhaps there was some interference on the frequency in use at the time, and the frequencies changed…
No its not warming up , its not like that the first half hour will always be bad, but the interference or problem could reoccur at any time.