Well, I bit the bullet and bought a whole year's worth of Home500 ADSL from NDO for 282 quid. I figured that I wouldn't have that kind of money again for a while, it also worked out at £23.50 per month doing it that way. Activation day was the 23rd of December.
Just one tiny snag - it doesn't work. I thought it might be my 2nd-hand Zoom X3 ethernet modem to blame, so I went out and spent another £39 on a PCI one. Same story.
How hard can it be to get ADSL working? I removed my 10/100 card and V90 modem to prevent any conflicts. This was followed by umpteen rounds of uninstalling / installing the modem software. Still no dice.
On Sandra's recommendation, I swapped my optical Intellimouse onto the PS2 bus and disabled USB in the bios to see whether there was a conflict between the Via chipset in my board and the USB bus. Nope. I've also downloaded and installed the latest Via drivers. Still nothing.
I've very occasionally had brief glimpses of a connection, but it won't resolve the URL of sites when in this state (although an IP address will work) and pretty soon dies. 99 times out of 100, whenever I try to connect, I get Error 651 - Modem error. Also note that ZoneAlarm has been uninstalled.
Another interesting feature, is that a 1394 adapter keeps appearing in my network connections. It is not physically present in the box and there isn't one on the MoBo. I've removed it from Hardware Devices several times, but XP Home insists on reinstalling it during boot up. I've now set it to disabled.
I suspect that a dependancy by some item of software could be to blame, although I've taken just about everything out of the equation at some stage or other -- even to the point of deleting stuff out of the Pre-fetch cache. I used to have cable broadband from NTL until I moved and have a sneaking feeling that XP thinks it's still there.
Because I didn't buy the hardware from NDO, they will only offer support on a 'best efforts' basis - which evidently doesn't extend to keeping their promises in regard to phoning me back. I've now spent quite a few pounds on calls to them, but always get stuck in the loop with some 1st liner who wants to go through the story from scratch again.
Does anyone have any ideas on what I can do next? From where I'm sat, Prozac seems worth a try.
