Yesterday we set up my broken-screened iBook with a surplus 15-inch monitor from Jen’s school. It still needed a new keyboard and mouse to be complete, but once it was set up we had a (somewhat awkward) second Mac workstation. I was looking forward to having a bit of networking set up between the two computers, having two Macs available in the household at any one time …

… and then irony struck. My Airport Base Station blew this afternoon. Not sure if it’s fixable — I’ve still got to do a bit of research — but here’s what happened. It couldn’t maintain a connection with the cable modem for more than a few seconds after rebooting. It could generate a wireless LAN fine enough; it just couldn’t stay connected to the Internet.

(No, I didn’t install the dodgy Airport 3.4 update. It’s a snow base station, not Extreme. At least I don’t think I installed the update … I installed an awful lot of updates on the iBook last night … )

So much for that little experiment. I’ll see if it’s fixable, but it’s not worth the cost or effort to replace the base station at this moment. (It’s provided non-stop service for over two years; I don’t think that’s too bad.)