It's About Freakin' Time!

After about four hours on the phone with tech support from MSN, Dell, and Adelphia cable, our new broadband internet is up and running (I'm now getting upwards of 350 K per second on downloads, as opposed to the 2 K max from our MSN dial-up). A technician came by this afternoon and spent two hours setting everything up. For some reason, he was not able to open any web pages after all of the hardware was installed. He thought that MSN might be the problem, and he gave up and left it all for me to figure out. So, I unistalled all the MSN crap, but the MSN sign-on screen kept popping up. Apparently, MSN is like a virus; it keep multiple copies of itself hidden in a system and refuses to go away. I called MSN tech support and they helped me find all of the hidden files and delete them. The internet still wasn't working. So I called Adelphia and after speaking to one guy, I was transferred to another guy who discovered that our IP address was to blame; it was evidently set to the Windows default due to a corrupted winsock file and not actually viable. So, he had me call Dell so that they could walk me through editing the winsock elements of the system registry and manually configuring them (a process that was, to say the least, not pretty at all). After all of that, I ran cmd and typed ipconfig and found out that we had a new IP . . . but the internet still didn't work. I then called Adelphia again and the second guy I talked to helped me to change a few simple settings in internet explorer, and now it's working! What a way to spend a Friday night . . .