Damnit.

So. There's the unsecured wireless network in my neighborhood (somewhere) that I've been stealing my internet from for lo this past year. Sometimes it isn't reliable, I realize, but I love it anyway, and it does the job.

Yesterday morning it was working normally like it always does. About mid-morning, I twice got one of those 'ip conflict - another device on the network has been assigned the same ip address' errors that sometimes pop up. Never had one on this network before. I put the computer away to do some other things and take a nap, etc, and then later I came back.

And that's when the problems started.

Now, every time I go to connect to the wireless network, i see the little 'radar' icon with the yellow shifting dot as normal for Windows. And then - as it has 'connected' to the wireless network, the computer freezes.

More frozen than you could imagine.

I must've restarted the computer a dozen times yesterday and twice this morning, without fail, the computer freezes as soon as it connects to the other network. which I just don't get. Sure, it could not connect or something, but what would be making it freeze?

Anyway. I hope I manage to get this sorted because I really don't want to have to pay for the internets.