There can only be ONE!

Wireless operates on the same basic principles as the Quickening, right?

So my MacBook, DEUS, usually so reliable, spontaneously and without any warning or apparent cause loses the ability to access the Internet. It can connect to wireless networks just fine, it'll connect to your cell phone from across the world, but it can't actually do anything with the connection. This is bothersome, as I am in the process of moving and for various reasons in this Modern Age that requires me to have Internet access.

So I dig out the old Toshiba, Wintermute, the venerable, battle-scarred, and frankly broken refurbished Toshiba I bought back in university and used more or less to death. It won't read most kinds of removable media anymore, it has trouble with the USB ports, the screen isn't great, the battery holds zero charge, it issues random exciting error messages you will never ever discover the cause or meaning of, and on and on, but its cheap generic wireless card still works. So I can haul it, my MacBook, and their respective power adapters down to the Internet cafe to look at tech support forums and figure out why DEUS abandoned me in my hour of need.

So I log on here, eating some kind of disgusting whipped-sugar pie and drinking the wateriest latté I have ever, I hesitate to say tasted, but had anyway. I begin digging into the forums, and find a very promising-sounding, though apparently borderline unsolvable, problem which sounds just like mine, but turns out not to be what I have at all. So I start looking for something else... And the café wireless dies.

I convince the shiftless sandwich jockey to reset the router, and find that Wintermute can now no longer connect to the wireless at all... But at the exact same instant, DEUS has Internet access again.

So apparently the problem is that only one laptop can have any given function at a time, and I just needed to sacrifice Wintermute's 'Net access so that DEUS could be resurrected. Now if only I could find a way to sacrifice Wintermute's larger screen...