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Pastimes : Computer Learning -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: thecow who wrote (23826)	12/13/2001 5:01:43 PM
From: (Bob) Zumbrunnen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110655

Was only on hold for about 20 minutes this time, but the support wasn't terribly helpful. First, the "Fair Use Policy" is that you can't download more than 169-meg in a 1-4 hour period during "peak time" or more than 225-meg in any 1-4 hour off-peak time. When is "peak time"? Good question. I asked. They didn't know. I'm unlikely to run afoul of those limits anyway. But you never know. If they gripe about it, I'll be able to tell them that two different tech support people said there's no way for me to monitor my total traffic, so I couldn't possibly know. I told the tech support guy that I'm having to frequently reboot the machine to get my connection back. I can tell this can be a very frustrating dead end. He had the following two things to offer: 1. Internet Connection Sharing is bad and unreliable. Funny. It never missed a beat in well over a year on dialup. Interesting they'd give that answer since they do happen to sell software for home networking... 2. My USB driver isn't Windows2K compliant. I told him that it showed that the driver was digitally signed by Microsoft and was even provided by them. Since the Device Manager identified it as a Via, I looked at the motherboard and read him the number off the only Via chip I could see. He said he was looking at MSFT's website and it's not shown as a supported USB chip. Despite my thinking that it's most certainly supported and has MSFT's blessing, I went to the Via website looking for a newer driver (this one's 2 years old). Funny. The chip whose number I read off to him turns out to be an audio processor, not USB. I'm going to try to make sure I've got all the latest drivers. I flashed the BIOS with the latest available one when I had trouble getting the ATA100 hard drive working under 2K (which, along with a newer driver, fixed that problem), so I know I'm fine there. And I've got all the most recent patches for 2K, so I should be fine there, too. I know if the problems persist even with a known good USB driver, they'll just blame ICS, so this is more of a last-ditch effort to see if I can just fix the problem myself before deciding whether it's worth the bother of putting it on a machine I don't mind frequently rebooting. Oh, and apparently the fact that I've got 2K AS and XP on the same network is a bad thing, too, according to them. The only solution they consider correct is to use it on a standalone 98/plain 2000/ME machine with the latest hardware in it. I suspect that's because you have to reboot so often with 98 that you won't think to blame them if you're doing it more often. <g> I should add that QCharts seemed to work just fine with it. There were more than 4 outages today but it came back on within 5 minutes all but those 4 times. Personally, I think their "bad USB driver" bit is a bunch of hot air, since I would expect complete failure if that were the case; not sporadic outages. But I'll go through the motions. My bet is that it's a combination of real outages on their end and relatively new/unproven software. At last count (that I was able to find), there are only 109,000 people using this.