Hi everyone!
Prior to the Covid-19 lockdown my remote home-working setup was using my K&S laptop alongside a 24” large screen and separate wireless keyboard and mouse which I’d treated myself to. (little tip for anyone who isn’t fully au fait with setting up anything IT-related – buying an additional screen?: make sure you’ve got an HDMI lead!).
Once the lockdown occurred back in March I realised that we were all in this for the long-haul and decided that I’d like to mirror at home the setup we have in the office and decided to buy myself a further additional 24” screen and additionally treat myself to the super-duper square HP Thunderbolt hub which we use in the K&S office as it has more USB ports than the small hub I already had … as well as an ethernet cable port! My new additional screen and HP hub arrived a couple of days later.. yay!! I was cautiously excited and got everything out of their boxes and once all leads were connected… including my ethernet cable which I wanted to use as I was beginning to get a few issues with software crashing as I’d be working on WiFi only and ethernet cable should give more stability… everything looked much neater and all in one place with only one port needing to be used on my laptop to connect to the HP hub.
At this point I thought “I’ll be rockin ‘n rollin now” and proceeded to start up the laptop and logged on. Jostle all good… Skype all good but.. UH OH!... I couldn’t connect to iManage (DMS), Inprotech, MyDesk or Outlook! Just wasn’t happening!!
I always do my best not to trouble IT until I’ve covered various things… the most important being… “switch off and switch on again!” and so I checked that all cables were in-tact … rebooted… and tried again! Nope… it wasn’t having it! [Sigh!] Further help was now required so I contacted our IT guys! It ended up being a conflict with using my new super duper hub, along with the ethernet cable to achieve internet access, and the fact that my internet service provider is Virgin Media. The thoughts in my head at the time were “did I really just waste money buying my super duper hub if I can’t use the ethernet cable?”.☹
To get me back up and running again I was advised to disconnect my ethernet cable and simply go back on to WiFi for now while they investigate.... which I did and everything started working again. However!.... reverting back to using WiFi brought back the occasional “crashing” issues again that I’d been having for a while beforehand. I’ve therefore been liaising with IT over the past few months who have been very patient with me when I keep emailing or skyping them about my issues. They’d pop onto my laptop and give it a kick start in the background and I’d be up and running again and, using their amazing clever programs in the background, they’ve been monitoring how many issues my laptop is having on a daily basis. (It really is amazing stuff that our IT guys do behind the scenes that we’re totally unaware of – I’ve seen one of their programs through screen-sharing – eeeek!!). Recently though things have become increasingly worse and it seemed that it’s a definite issue with security settings which Virgin Media set in place with their routers… essentially blocking certain VPN access and this was therefore causing the crashing!
Great news though! Between myself and IT doing lots of digging it looks like we’ve managed to get to the bottom of the issue and we’ve found that if you change a setting on your Virgin Media router to disable something known as ANES (Advanced Network Error Search) this then stops all the issues with using VPN. Now I’m pleased to say I really am “rocking ‘n rolling” and very excited (I’ve been in lockdown way too long!!) about this resolution. I’m able to use my ethernet cable and everything is working perfectly and generally the systems are faster and definitely more stable! Woo hoo!! 😊
Through all of this process though the communication between myself and IT has been great - whether it’s been via email, skype or screen-sharing. I’ve learnt that, no matter what your issue is, they really do need to know about it. “Putting up” with issues because you think that’s the way things are isn’t the case… IT really do need to know as it helps them with their background checks/comparisons/investigations. What might be happening to you could be happening to others too and they could eventually come up with a fix for everyone. Always remember... if IT don’t know of issues… they can’t fix things.
Based on my experience, if anyone else is having issues with crashing or unable to use your ethernet cable and you’re with Virgin Media… get in touch with IT… I do believe they have a fix which will make day-to-day working sooo much better! 😊