When the RR installation crew shows up at your house, they have one objective: getting RR up and running—not necessarily leaving your computer the way they found it. One fellow installs the cable and attaches it to the modem, then a second person installs a network card in your computer (if necessary), connects the cable modem to it and installs the RR software. They do this as many as five or six times each day. So they obviously know what they are doing.

What they don’t like to see is a Local Area Network. They will tell you up front that your network will probably not work correctly when they leave. And they are not wrong. The inside fellow makes all the changes he feels are necessary to get RR running on the RR network. In my case, that consisted of removing every network protocol I had installed except TCP/IP on the network card in the main computer. He then set it to have a server assigned IP address.

When he left RR worked fine, but my LAN was nonfunctional. Part of the problem was my fault. I thought, based on bad advice I had read on the Internet, that I could simply connect the cable modem output to the uplink socket on my network hub, with each of the computers on the network—including the one with the RR software installed—connecting as usual to the hub. RR still worked fine, but now none of the computers could see each other.

Adding the protocol NetBEUI back to the network card in the main computer got me back to where the main computer could now see the other two, but this was not true 100% of the time, and the other computers could never see the main one. I am not talking about the other computers being able to connect to the Internet through the main computer's RR connection. I am referring to simple networking.

All sorts of tweaking the network properties on all the computers made no difference. So after some more Internet research (this time correct), I went out and bought a second network card for the main computer—something I could have had for free from RR if I had thought I had needed one (the installation fellow was all too happy to not have to find a free IRQ to install a second card when I told him just to use the one already in the computer).

I knew this might present a problem. I had a PSI slot for it but no free IRQ. I put it in anyway and let Win 98 find it and prompt me for the driver. It seemed to install OK, choosing to share an IRQ with the video card and the other network card. Who am I to question this? Win 98 knows a lot more about such things than I. I had consulted with Merle Nicholson, and he said that sharing an IRQ would cause a problem—and it did. My mouse would now freeze randomly for brief moments. The video card and the first network card had been sharing IRQ 11 OK, but they obviously didn’t like a visitor.

What to do now? Well, Merle had suggested that I might want to disable COM 2 in the BIOS since I wasn’t using it (my mouse is a PS2 mouse and my modem uses COM 1). That should make the IRQ 3 used by COM 2 available. Unfortunately a removal of the second network card from the Windows Device setup and a reboot did not produce a move of it to IRQ 3. It went right back with its friends on IRQ 11.

To make a long story short—and it took me several days to figure this one out—I did the following:

• In addition to disabling COM 2 in the BIOS, disabled it in the Windows Device Manager configuration.
• Physically removed one of the network cards from the computer.
• Rebooted the computer and then found that the remaining network card was now on IRQ 3.
• Shut down, put the second network card back in the computer and rebooted. Windows found it again , asked for the driver disk and the card was installed. And to my joy it was also on IRQ 3 instead of 11.

Why should I be happy since they were now both on IRQ 3 instead of IRQ 11? Well, the video card was on 11, not 3—and despite Merle’s foreboding, the mouse worked fine. However, a quick check showed me that my networking was still not working correctly. Again, this may have been due to ignorance on my part. I was—and still am—of the opinion that for peer to peer networking between computers you only need the NetBEUI protocol to be bound to the network cards. I had that and had added IPX/SPX for good measure, but that did no good. Finally after some thought I added TCP/IP to the three network cards on the network and assigned each of the computers the fixed IP addresses of 192.168.0.1, 192.168.0.2, and 192.168.0.3.

I should note that while my network was down I was still able to do all the usual network things via LapLink on each computer under the IPX protocol. Chalk one up for LapLink.

One of my primary reasons for wanting a cable modem was the need to upload web sites consisting of 20 plus megabytes to the Internet. With a regular modem, that can take a long time with the very good possibility that the connection will be lost before the upload is finished. With the cable modem, uploads go much faster. It took me 28 minutes to publish our 19 MB TPCUG site to the new server. With a 28,800 modem (or with a 56,000 modem since at my home the telephone line will not let any dial-up connection go faster than around 28,800), it would have taken probably five times that long.

The upload was done the evening after our regular meeting and one day after getting the cable modem. It was not done without incident, though. When I went to use Microsoft FrontPage (FP) to do the upload, FP said it couldn’t run until it had a web server to use on my computer (Microsoft PWS). PWS had somehow become uninstalled. I could, of course, blame it on the RR installation. But who knows. Don’t blame, just insert the FrontPage CD and get the PWS installation file off that. Not quite—the CD auto-started, and the FP installation program came up, noted that PWS was not installed and informed me that in order to install FP, I should first let it install PWS. Since that is what I planned doing anyway, I said go ahead. After PWS was installed I tried to cancel the FP installation that was to follow, but that apparently caused problems, since when I tried to open FP, it wouldn’t run. So I had to reinstall FP anyway. Once that was done, finally I was able to publish the TPCUG site to the new server.

But, as usual, my problems were not over. Since I had reinstalled PWS that meant that I had to redo the aliases for the local versions of web sites and I needed to reinstall the Active Server Pages Component (ASP). But that didn’t make the computer too happy, since ASP was trying to install an older version of OBDC than Visual Basic 6.0 had just installed a month back. It seems there will never be any peace from the problem of the older version trying to install over the newer version of something. Not to worry, though, since both ASP and VB 6 seem to work OK, which means probably that the older version did not get installed and ASP works fine with the newer version. At least that is what I think the situation is.

It was good that I persevered in getting the web site moved to the new server, since next morning when I checked, the domain name TPCUG.ORG had been moved to numeric address of the new server.

I have not observed the blazing speed that has been mentioned with cable, but I am happy with the increase over my dial up connection with uploads five times as fast on average and downloads that are perhaps 15 to 16 times as fast. When I have time I will try to get a more accurate measure of these speeds. u