For months my cable internet has been unreliable. It would work fine for weeks then hardly work at all for an hour or two, usually when I really didn't have time to wait for the problem to clear up. For the last few weeks I could (often) get online in Windows, but not at all from a Puppy Linux multisession DVD. This seemed to me to boil down to a flaky modem, but I thought it also could be some sort of software or firmware problem. The cable company were happy to send out repairmen but by the time they could get to my house the trouble had cleared up, and they found nothing wrong. Today it barely worked at all, all day long, losing a high proportion of packets according to the cable company technical support.
My cable modem is a Zoom 5001 PCI card internal model. I get the distinct impression it is the only internal modem my cable company has ever seen. It was the cheapest cable modem in the store, but I bought it mostly because an internal modem would minimize the clutter of cables and cords behind my computer. It works very well, when it works.
When it screwed up again today, I made another appointment for a repairman to come to my house the earliest he could, which was Sunday. After I hung up the phone it occurred to me to try wiggling the modem card in the computer and, walla, I was surfing the net at full speed again! I booted my Puppy multisession DVD, ran the Ethernet configuration wizard, and was back here in the forum in no time.
Cable internet woes finally resolved by reseating modem.
Cable internet woes finally resolved by reseating modem.
Last edited by Flash on Thu 03 Nov 2005, 13:55, edited 1 time in total.
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Lobster
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Good News that you are up to speed. Loose / dirty connections are often a problem - they can kick in as a motherboard warms up and expands . . .
Reminds me of an old motherboard that would only run at not 350mhz as stated but to run reliably had to be undeclocked to 333mz. Now how on earth was I meant to know this? Why on earth would I underclock my motherboard (from BIOS) but having tried everything else - this worked and the reliability went to 100% - the speed drop was not noticed. I never saw this mentioned in all the suggestions and possibilities from various websites - so until fixed I was not sure of the cause and solution.
Anyway good news.
