A Different Kind Of Crash

[seekermeister]

At least different in terms of what I'm accustomed to. Last evening, while browsing, my mouse stopped working. Of course, that's nothing new, since it is cordless, but popping in a fresh battery didn't help, nor did some of my other usual SOP for that. Then I noticed that the LED for the mouse on my USB hub wasn't lit, though they were for other devices. I moved the mouse to my front I/O port, and it started working normally.

Then trying to resume my browsing, I found that I apparently no longer had an internet connection, but I falsely made the assumption that was due to my cable company. Leaving the computer on, I went to bed, hearing a pong-ping every 10 minutes, as it does when there is no internet connection.

When I awoke to tackle the problem, with the pong-ping continuing, and finding the pattern of lights on the cable modem being normal, and my telephone, which works on the cable also being normal, I decided to try a reboot, even though both computers on my LAN were effected in the same manner. The screen dimmed in the manner that it does when there is a problem shutting down a program, and listed two, but I could only see the one for RocketDock, because the other was covered by an error dialog, saying that RD couldn't be shutdown, so I selected to force it's shutdown.

That cleared the dim screen, but then it hung on the shutdown screen and I had to do a forced reboot. It seemed to reboot normally, until I reached desktop, and RD appeared with a black rectangular box around it, and another smaller one that I have no idea of where it came from, in the top left corner of the screen.

After this series of quirks, normal function seems to have returned, two both rigs on the LAN. Therefore, there is no problem to solve, except that I would like to have some idea of what might have been the basis of such a variety of problems, yet not produce a BSOD? I have run Malwarebytes and it says that all is well, and I haven't heard any squawks from anything else.

 

[not so gray matter]

If both computers on your LAN were affected by the network issue, that's likely an issue with your router.

 

[seekermeister]

If both computers on your LAN were affected by the network issue, that's likely an issue with your router.

That would make sense to me, except that doesn't seem to explain the problems with the mouse, or with rebooting, and the fact that everything is working properly now. I do have a new router on order, but not because I have had any problem due to the old router before. I don't know much about routers...do they sometimes just throw a tantrum?

 

[seekermeister]

Stranger and stranger. The internet connection just went out again on my primary computer, but remains normal on the secondary. I rebooted the primary, but the connections still remains dead. Since the secondary is working, that seems to eliminate a problem with either the modem or router, so why would the primary croak in this fashion?

 

[seekermeister]

Odd! Now it is working again.