Random thoughts
Sunday, November 7, 2010
How to fix the “Your computer is not connected to the network” error with Yahoo! Messenger
If you are like me and upgrade software only when there are critical security fixes or you badly need a few feature, you may have tried sticking to an older version of Yahoo! Messenger. I made the mistake of upgrading, and was almost cut off voice service for a few days. Fortunately, Yahoo! has a fix for the problem, which only seems to affect some users.
The new video calling capability in Yahoo! Messenger 10 didn't really draw my attention. Nevertheless I eventually gave in and allowed the automatic upgrade, if only to get rid of the nagging upgrade notice. At first everything seemed fine: The settings were copied over, and the user interface looked reasonably familiar. However, soon after, voice calls started failing with an obscure error message “Your computer is not connected to the network”. Restarting Yahoo! Messenger sometimes helped, but clearly this wasn't working as reliably as the previous version. “Works sometimes” wasn't good enough for me.
Yahoo! support was exceptionally helpful, within minutes the helpdesk agent had identified that I was running Yahoo! Messenger version 10.0.0.1270-us, which was the latest and greatest at the time but a few issues with voice telephony. He recommended uninstalling the current messenger and manually installing a slightly back-level version of Yahoo! Messenger 10, and disallow further automatic upgrades. The installation worked smoothly, and voice support in Yahoo! Messenger has been working flawlessly ever since.
Thank you, Yahoo! support.
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Labels: networking, technology, windows