After spending the best part of the day wresting with an extremely buggy connection, I've spent the last half-hour trying to get the Internet to work in my bedroom without an awful lot of noticeable success. Or indeed any.

The usual thing to do when the net goes down here is reset the modem and see if my connection doobob thinger recognizes that I'm trying to make a connection and just gets on with it after doublechecking everything's fine downstairs. This has worked without fail before but tonight I tried to do it three times and nothing was happening. Our home network kept vanishing from the list of stuff that I could connect to, and resetting made no difference. Like I said, I did this three times.

There are about six other networks on that list at the best of times - none of which I can access, of course, as they're all quite sensibly private. It's not my wireless connector's problem, that's still working just fine. It's the modem, and that's nothing that it's within my power to sort out. It's not my modem, and it's not attached to my computer - it's my landlady's, and it's attached to her son's machine.

I've come downstairs to see if a wireless connection can be made to my landlady's own computer, which I used back when I had my old non-net-capable Windows '98 clunker, and that's what I'm making this post from at the moment - which I guess answers that question. (This is very determinedly not ideal; she doesn't even have Firefox down here, still less AIM, but it does at least allow me to access the Internet.) My own computer is doing what I always resort to when I reach the end of my limited ability to troubleshoot a problem and JUST DON'T KNOW what to do next - restarting, in the hope that just maybe it'll work itself out, at least for now. If it does and all clears up from here on in, well, hooray for that. If it doesn't - well, I'm pretty much stuck. My landlady is not going to shell out to replace a malfunctioning bit of kit that is only not working for me. It just ain't going to happen.

If I knew the connection issues were my end and thus my problem I'd just have to find the money for a new wireless receiver, but that's not what the diagnostics are telling me it is. It's only our home network that keeps winking in and out: my neighbor's wireless connection is detectable all the time, as are two or three other wireless networks within range. If my connection was the one failing, surely all the local networks should be registering as inaccessible, not just our own? I can't justify the expense if I'm not sure that's what the problem is - and I really don't think it is.

So, if this doesn't work itself out, I will at least still be able to update from down here. I just won't be able to come online with anything like the same regularity I did while working from my own room - and, if that does prove to be the case, I will no longer be available on AIM. It's not installed down here and web messenger... well, web messenger has Issues, especially when talking at length.

I am extremely sorry about this, but if the modem really is fucked and just doesn't want to give me a wireless signal from my room, there is absolutely nothing I can do to solve it.

No, it really looks like the Internet connection in my room is dead.

I have tried just about everything I can think of to get the thing working again. Admittedly. this isn't much, but it's all I know to do. I've been resetting the modem (repeatedly), resetting my machine (also repeatedly), playing with the connection settings, troubleshooting why my connection might be unavailable all of a sudden... I even tried the thing I did which gave me a connection last night, logging on down here and seeing if the wireless connection would kick in as a result, and even that won't work now. I guess it was a fluke that it even did last night.

The result, for any of you who care about my presence or otherwise, is this:

I will only be able to come online intermittently from now until this shit sorts itself out.

This may be a matter of a few days or weeks, if I can manage to figure out what the issue is and actually get it fixed - if it turns out that it's within my power to fix it - or it may be a lot, lot longer. It may be that this won't resolve until Sarah gets a new modem or I move, whichever comes first. Given that absolutely all I can do is somehow find the money for a new wireless connector, if the problem is anything other than that I will not be able to fix it myself and will therefore be reliant on the problem getting worse so that the rest of the household is also affected.

I have at least managed to figure out a way around relying solely on MSN messenger - which, as it turns out, we don't have downstairs after all; the icon's on the desktop, but the program's not there - but it depends on a web client. It's not ideal in all sorts of ways.

I just wish there was some way I could figure out if the problem is my wireless adaptor or the modem's ability to maintain a wireless connection without having to go and buy another wireless adaptor to check: while I don't think the problem is my end, I'm almost hoping that it is because at least if it's my wireless access thing that's dying I can just go out and buy another one instead of hoping against hope that someone else will be able to fix this, maybe. I really, really do not have the money to go and and get another adaptor on the offchance that it'll fix this. I need to know that replacing my hardware will solve the problem, and right now I can't say that.

I'm really, really sorry about this, but I don't know what else there is for it. I can't fix this, and I can't keep wasting my time trying the same old things in the hope that maybe this time it'll work.