As I've mentioned before, we don't have DSL at the moment (cue wailing and gnashing of teeth, which I know is pathetic but you just get so used to reliable and fast connections). As an interim measure while broadband is being turned on our new DSL provider has set us up with a dial up account so we can at least check email.
Not that it works, mind.
It has been something like two years since I even used dial up, and that was on a Linux machine which already had the account settings in place. Trying to make a Windows machine do dial up from scratch is more like four years ago for me, and I had forgotten just how clunky it actually was. The basic settings are easy enough to put in place, but the things like telling Windows not to disconnect when the connection is not "needed" are buried too deeply. Why can't Windows use text files to do its configuration like a real operating system?
I had the modem dialling pretty quickly (albeit with some rather surprising noises as it discharged some capacitance in its circuits), and a quick call to tech support had the account activated so that it would login, but thirty minutes of thrashing around with different network settings and talking to the tech support person got me no closer to connecting. Poor Abby of tech support - "Press the 'Advanced' button." "There isn't one." "You've got IE5.5 - there must be one." "No, there isn't." - this went on for some time. There are many reasons I hate Microsoft, but moving buttons around arbitrarily is one of them.
As a bit of a test, I tried doing the dial up using ithaqua. It went straight through - pinging, email downloading, web being surfed, everything, and all at a pretty respectable speed too.
I'm fairly sure the problem on the Windows machine now is not the modem, since it dials and authenticates and says "CONNECTED" in the log, but I have my suspicions about a collision between the dialup networking settings and the ethernet settings: I vaguely recall that I've had these things collide before, or at the very least I remember my astonishment that these things could collide.
And to top it all my mobile phone is rattling. Phones are not supposed to rattle. I need to take it to the repair shop before something breaks off.
Posted by Dunx at August 27, 2003 09:08 AM