So it’s 1:46 a.m. and I’m still awake. I had planned to get to bed nice and early to celebrate my birthday 
but I wound up fixing a computer instead. How can you say no when a totally gorgeous girl1 mentions that IT is about to charge her $80 to fix her Internet connection? 
I assumed it would be an easy fix. The wireless driver seemed to be bad; I could scan but no networks showed up. I uninstalled the driver and planned to grab a new one via the wired connection. Except it didn’t work either. Well, if TCP/IP in general is busted, the most obvious problems are Winsock2 corruption, and LSP stack issues. I popped open the computer and saw that it wasn’t picking up an IP address ( “limited or no connectivity” ). Okay, so either DHCP is bad, or Winsock is gone. However, there was a more immediate problem… over half a dozen different firewalls, antivirus apps, spyware scanners, all configured to start and run on boot. With all that junk running, I couldn’t get anything done, so I first took a bit to wipe most of them out. One of the last ones I uninstalled was McAfee Firewall; since OU has its own firewall, software-level stuff isn’t particularly needed. And that was my mistake.
