Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Windows ME - Help ME!

Round 3 of installing Dad’s ADSL service took place last night and unfortunately I am a long way behind on points. After sitting at his desk until quarter to one in the morning, we were still unable to connect his PC to ADSL.

What we did do was install the third modem that Internode sent to us (a Billion) and that went very smoothly and all seemed to be in good working order. The only problem was that we couldn’t ping any external IP address and we couldn’t load any web page. Seemed to be a settings issue and we tried and tried again.

With no luck whatsoever, a call to Internode help desk rendered assistance after waiting an hour and a quarter (!!) and we were able to establish that the modem was working, that the line was good (we tested the modem on my laptop with 100% success) and that the PC was able to connect to the modem via pinging the gateway. The only issue was we couldn’t ping the Internode IP address.

However, the Help Desk guy could see us on his screen. We were on the Internode network and the Billion configuration panel was telling us we had an established connection. All lights on the modem that were supposed to be lit were lit and there seemed to be no impediment to why we couldn’t connect to a web page.

So after engaging and disengaging the Billion fire wall and after playing around with auto detect DNS and hard coding the appropriate DNS’ we still couldn’t get the net up (or email). The Internode tech guy asked me to look at the “NAT Sessions” screen and he was surprised that there were no NAT sessions recorded (I don’t know what a NAT Session is) and this seemed to stump him. Essentially modem worked, Ethernet card worked, line worked, yet no net. Only missing piece was something with the PC itself which runs WindowsME.

As we all know WinME is not the best (probably worst) Microsoft OS and the techie suggested that we reinstall ME as whilst it has its flaws it should still be possible to connect to the net. I did this last night and we took 30 mins to reload WinME but no luck.

So I called it quits and drove home and am stumped as to what the issue is. Anyone got any ideas!?!?





[edit] - a Whirlpool forum topic can be found here, so if you can assist, please post either here on Lime Kettles or on the Whirlpool board. Thanks!

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