OneNote wasn't working, but at least there were no bugs

When I got in this morning I turned to my laptop to check some OneNote pages I use to track some To Do items. I grabbed the mouse connected to the docking station and tried to click the page. The mouse pointer did not move, though.

Next I tried the little button in the keyboard - this is a Lenovo - and that worked fine. Tried the mouse again, no luck. Plugged the mouse directly into the laptop and it still did not work. Since it is an optical mouse, I flipped it over to see if the light was on and it was not. To double check, I plugged it into a desktop and still no light. Tried a different mouse and it worked fine.

Initially, though, I had thought maybe there was a problem with OneNote and the mouse, but that did not make much sense. After all that, I was glad to see that there was a simple explanation here.

Next up, I had to use a tablet in another tester's office to try a test on SkyDrive. Again, this did not work. There were no errors - it just did not connect. This is not, from a testing point of view, all that unexpected since I was trying to see if a bug that was essentially "I can't connect to SkyDrive" was fixed. It was looking like it was not fixed so I went to get some more data for the developer.

The first thing I need was a Fiddler trace (www.fiddler2.com). I started Fiddler and tried again. There was no network traffic at all. Since our building has been getting new network cabling recently, and a large upgrade to our proxy servers, I went to double check proxy settings. Again, everything seemed in order. I tried one last time to get a Fiddler trace but again nothing was there. I tried to save a text file for some of the proxy settings but could not connect to a machine in my office as a location to save the file.

Since I could not get anything to work, I restarted. Again, nothing. I reached down to restart one more time and my hand brushed against the network cable. The disconnected network cable. Sigh. I guess this happens to everyone now and then.

Once I got the cable plugged in, I was able to finish my testing and send the results to the team.

I'm just glad all these problems were hardware related.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John