@Home = @Hell. Here's how to avoid it.

[mbpark]

Hello,

I spent part of my day undoing the hell that Comcast@Home wreaked upon my sister's poor Athlon 900. Their cable modem software they install HATES Windows 2000 Service Pack 2. Actually, it causes a blue screen of death on startup. Their tech support does not want to resolve the issue. So, I did it on my own.

Here's how to REALLY install their cable service, with no pain.

0. Do NOT install any software they give you. Ever. Pretend the CD's never existed.

1. Get a Linksys Cable/DSL router. $79 from buy.com, and available at your local CompUSA, OfficeMax, Office Depot, or Staples, or online if you choose. Get the one with the 4-port switch. It lets you connect up a few computers very easily.

2. Get two lengths of Cat-5e straight-through cabling. Crossover is not good for this exercise.

3. Take one length of Cat-5e and attach it to the Ethernet port on your cable modem.

4. Put the other end in the WAN port of your Linksys router.

5. Take the other length and attach it to port 1 on the Cable Modem.

6. Attach the other end of that to your computer's ethernet card. If @Home installed yours, it's an SMC Fast Ethernet card, and it's not too bad. Enjoy.

7. Boot up your computer. Make sure that your Ethernet card is set up for DHCP and the DNS servers are not set.

8. After making sure that the addresses can be allocated dynamically, you'll want to reboot if you run Windows 98, Me, or 95. If you run Win2K or XP, it will autoconfigure. If you run Linux, BSD, or any other OS, you'll want to renew the DHCP address, or if you run Solaris, /sbin/ifdown hme0 and /sbin/ifup hme0.

9. Open IE, Netscape, or Mozilla to http://192.168.1.1 . Change the admin password ASAP to something other than admin .

10. Change the machine name on the first page to the machine name @Home wants you to change it to.

11. Hit the 'apply' button at the bottom of the page.

12. Enjoy Internet. It autoconfigures via a DHCP server and puts a firewall in place for you.

13. Liberally laugh at @Home, who can't configure for Win2K without installing Win2K drivers that don't make the machine crap itself.

14. Thank them for the sweet SMC card they give out, which has really stable Win2K drivers, and works quite well with Linux and BSD from what I know .

Today I had the experience from heck. Comcast@Home techs tried to install an Ethernet card in her machine, and the driver for the cable modem (I found out after doing quite a few traces of DLL's on it) were the ones causing the BSoD.

I hope this prevents pain like I had. Doing traces of bad DLL's on machines that aren't Diginexus machines is not pleasant, especially when it's my sister's and I dislike when systems I build for people get brutalized by bad techs.

I'll use the saved money for the Athlon 1.4 CPU and extra 512MB of RAM she needs.

Considering that she runs SPSS on a regular basis for grad school work, she needs 768MB RAM and a fast cpu for crunching numbers, not Quake. Grad Students love numbers.

Take care,

Mitch