Cable almost here, what next ?

[Electr Salesman]

Arial BoldCable wo/man on his/her way this Thursday for basic installation. My SB4100 modem in transit Fed Express. Have my Linksys LNE100TX V.4 etherFast ready to install. (Actually I've already installed it once, but it created problems with dial-up to aol (same IRQ) and had to uninstall). Compaq tells me that before I receive cable I need to unistall the aol program but not any of the network adapters in device manager. I'm running Me. Is this correct? And should I be setting anything else? I've read here not to install the @Home program, what else should I do? I know there will be some patches and tweaks, but hooking up is the first step. Your advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks..

[Matt615]

You shouldnt have to un-install AOL. If you still want to use it than keep it, if not than you can get rid of it. Once it is hooked up you can start tweaking but worry about getting it working for now.

[CompGeek83]

the best thing to do is to uninstall aol immediately, especially if yer getting cable and wont need dialup

[Matt615]

Originally posted by CompGeek83
the best thing to do is to uninstall aol immediately, especially if yer getting cable and wont need dialup

That depends on whether he wants to use AOL with the Cable with AOL's $9.99 a month plan for "BYOA" (Bring your own Access)

[martialcomp]

I must agree with Compgeek. Recently, there has been a renewal in the AOL/@Home connection issue. Apparently, everything works fine for a while until you receive an AOL update. Then, you start having connection problems. Intermittent or complete loss of connectivity can occur. Usually, the issue can be identified by what I call a corrupt host name in winipcfg.exe under More Info. The corruption usually (but not always) changes the beginning of your host name and adds "destao" to the end of the host name. It can also add any combination of the above such as "de", "des", etc. It can also add strange characters to the beginning of the host name as well. Apparently, the AOL updates are changing the Winsock2 registry key. This can occur with AOL 5.0, 6.0 or Compuserve 2000 (which is really just AOL 5.0). There are 4 possible fixes:

1. Use System Restore.
2. Call AOL for the "Step 5 fix".
3. Reformat and reinstall Windows
4. Go here: http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb ... 8/5/50.ASP
or here if ICS is involved:
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb ... 4/4/98.asp

The fix involves removing ALL networking components, NOT rebooting upon clicking OK, then removing the Winsock2 registry key using regedit.exe. Then forcing a reboot and reinstalling all components. All settings would need to be written down before starting this process.