A customer in Thornlands contacted me because her PC wouldn’t upgrade to Windows 11 and had developed several strange problems.
The hardware was compatible, but there were a few mysteries to solve first.
Windows wasn’t activated, which was straightforward to resolve. More puzzling was the keyboard: typing the letter L locked the computer! The dual Apple/Windows keyboard had accidentally switched into Apple mode, causing Windows-key shortcut behaviour. Once corrected, typing returned to normal. Without knowing the cause, you could be forgiven for thinking the computer was possessed.
Microsoft Edge also kept asking the customer to choose an account whenever it opened. The culprit was a Copilot setting, which we adjusted to stop the interruption.
Next came the slow internet. Despite a 500 Mbps NBN fibre-to-the-premises connection, the PC was achieving only around 10 Mbps.
Testing showed the Telstra modem received the full speed, but the Google mesh unit connected to it managed only about 50 Mbps. Replacing the Ethernet cable restored approximately 500 Mbps at the main mesh unit.
Getting that speed across a large house was another challenge, with the connection entering at one corner of the garage. Repositioning the mesh nodes improved download speeds at the PC to around 120 Mbps—roughly twelve times the original result.
The customer was considering another mesh node or two to improve coverage. With the existing system now performing much better, I recommended holding off and allowing Wi-Fi 7 mesh systems time to become more widely available and mature, with early issues ironed out, before investing in a replacement system.
After a general clean-up and tune-up of the PC and laptop, Windows 11 installed and updated without issue.
Several separate faults had combined to make the computer frustrating to use. Working through them methodically restored normal operation, improved the Wi-Fi and completed the upgrade.
