The cable modem installers, thought (knew) I was a freak!! (1 Viewer)

[Hugh M]

Hi,

funny thing happened today. The installers came in the door, and couldn't figure where my (HT)PC was. So I pointed in the general direction, and they were still way off. I have a 27" TV and next to that a 27" monitor. The HTPC is ugly right now, awaiting a custom-made HTPC front plate, but its right next to the TV, under my receiver. Its really obvious, with brown front and beige drives. But because its in the entertainment center I guess it still eluded their eyes. I had to go over to the HTPC and point right at it and say HERE.

Then one of the guys looked at the monitor and said, geesh thats the biggest monitor I've ever seen. hehehe I wish I had a nice Plasma, maybe they would have thought it was a window. I could have told them they were on another planet!!

when one of them said, "do you want me to do the network settings?" I should have said yes and watched him try and control the cursor with the IR mouse on my keyboard. that would have been fun to see. amazingly these guys didn't know much about computers. But they were only here for 10 minutes, and everything was set to go. so they "done" their job. good thing is I didn't need them to do much but hand over the box.

One of the last things they asked for form info purposes was "Is it a Gateway or is it a Clone."

"Clone?" what is this 1985? My IBM XT has long been gone, but it did have a desktop case, and a power outlet on the power supply. Hey , what the heck happened? those were good cases.

Hey, if either of you guys are reading this. I just wanted to say that you did your job. And at least you (unlike me) have a job.

I haven't tweaked the settings yet, but so far general web-surfing isn't much faster than my 56k dial-up. I have disabled the "search for scheduled tasks" gimmick, so I'll have to look a little harder for more speed. Downloads from good sites are around 175k/sec though. NOT BAD!!

 

[AndyVX]

One possible solution is to turn of the proxy that is normally on by default. ("automatically detect settings") Turn this off. I find that most ISP's proxies are terribly slow
Tools -> Internet Options -> Connections tab -> Lan Settings
(This is of course if you are using IE)

 

[Hugh M]

I don't have anything on that page checked at all.

maybe I should?

the thing that is slow is before it starts to load the page. nothing, then boom. sometimes it all happens right away. most of the time, I could be doing this just as fast with a 56k modem though.

I need to tweak this thing I think,

by the way the USB connection wouldn't be quicker would it? I have it going CAT5 to my NIC card right now.

 

[MikeAlletto]

Sounds like its not the cable modem but either the speed of the computer itself or the DNS servers of the provider...

 

[Hugh M]

fast computer.

could be the DNS, I've tried both defining the DNS and not defining the DNS I guess thats pointless with this setup.

hopefully it will get better, if not I'll start to whine, probably in their front office. real close to here.

 

[Eric Samonte]

Try this site Hugh...made my cable go from 90k to a whopping 1.2 mbps!
http://www.cable-modems.org/articles/speed_tweaks/

 

[Jeff Rosz]

Here is another good site for tweaking just about everything. be sure to run their TCP/IP analyzer. then they tell you just what you need to do.

 

[Hugh M]

thanks everybody!!
I visited alot of those sites, and did some of the tweaks, and used the tests and everything. The results were not bad, but then I found CableNut which is a pretty simple tweaking program. All you do is download it and then pick one of the proprietary reg like files and double click on it.
The one I chose was "Cable Modem/2K slow" because I have what they call a capped connection, and the software IS compatible with XP, which is what I am using. Rebooted, and this had a great effect. Using the task manager to monitor the network performance and grabbing as many downloads as I possibly could, this tweak alone boosted the throughput by 33%. I was averaging 15% of the 10Mbps NIC connection. And now I average at least 20%. This is killer. I've been downloading faster than I ever thought I would. I have also noticed that the regular web surfing is faster as well. although this "surfing" will be the one part that really suffers during peak times.
so check it out if you like, I use roadrunner with the standard service, and its been up around 20% for several hours now. I suspect that during peak times it will go down to about 10%. But hey, can't water your lawn during certain times of the day, can't burn your fireplace at all in Denver for the most part, I think I can deal with a little peak traffic on my cable modem.
disclaimer: I do own AOL timewarner stock, I am really down on it as well right now. this has no effect on my elation here, I hate freakin AOL ok?

 

[DonRoeber]

Last time I moved, I told the installers I had a Mac, and that they should just run the cable and plugin the modem. I plugged in my Mac to the ethernet cable, got a DHCP address, and told them to go away. I don't want them using my equipment. And they were happy to have a simple install.

 

[Richard Cooper]

When we had our cable installed, it took one guy 10 mins to run the coax in, one guy 10 mins to get it set up (I already had the NIC in and setup). And 2 hours for them to dribble over my speakers This was my c.1960 Wharfedales, they didn't even see my Ruarks! They had no problems finding my machine, I'd sumped it on the floor by teh cable TV box. I just got tehm to coil up some wire and leave it like that until we'd decided where we wanted the modem. We've moved it 3 times in 6 months, and have 4 computers attached to it, and when my HCPC (home cinema pc - I'm English ) is finished (just waiting for the HSF to fire it up, then I need a decent graphics card for it and a soundcard) there'll be 5.