I’m losing my fucking mind here.

I’m not some illiterate fool when it comes to computers and technology. I’m quite adept, if I do say so myself.

Last Xmas when we got a couple of new laptops, I figured it was finally time to set up some sharing between PC’s. My desktop has the printer attached and an external drive that holds all gazillion mp3s we have. I simply turned on file sharing and printer sharing and in no time had the laptops accessing our music collection and printing from the desktop.

Fast forward approximately 11 months.

All was fine until a few weeks ago. My daughter suddenly couldn’t print. It wasn’t anything major so I kinda blew her off. A few days (a week or two?) later she needed to print something again and kept getting an error. I asked if she could access the music and she couldn’t. So I grabbed my laptop and had the same issue.

So this weekend I finally got around to trying to figure out what’s up. 4 days later and my brain hurts. There’s no reason it shouldn’t be working. It now wants a username/password. There isn’t one set-up and it never needed it before. I’ve tried a million combinations of things and nothing works. At one point while messing around I got the printer to spit out a bunch of stuff from her laptop, but couldn’t make it happen at will.

Then today I was messing again (because this is driving me nuts) and tried printing from her laptop. Nothing. I went to mess with the desktop and closed her laptop and suddenly the printer came to life and spit out my test print. I opened the laptop back up, clicked on her name to get back to the desktop and was able to print whatever I wanted. I then tried to access the mp3 drive and had no problem.

I had a hunch though.

I rebooted her laptop. Then I tried to print. Nada. Then I tried to access the mp3 drive. It asked for user/pass.

ARRRRGH!

And I can’t replicate whatever makes it suddenly spit out prints. Not sure what was common in the two times I managed to get it to work. I think it was closing the laptop, but that alone doesn’t do the trick when I want it to.

It’s literally eating away at me. I hate when shit isn’t working.