Back From the world of Ethernet

Hi Folks, Jared Here.... well this completes the long journey in a fried dsl modem and the saga surounding it. What a pain... and the folks at centurytel couldn't whip there way out of a paper sack when it comes to techknowhow.... It all started last week when I awoke on wednesday morning to find our DSL modem without any of the beautiful green lights that indicate there is life within that little black box with the misleading name of Netopia... more like Netapioka pudding. After arriving home that night I took the little black box apart... it's just what I do when something won't work...there's gotta be a broken belt or somethign I can replace. There was this small piece of plastic rattling around and it appeared to come from one of the electronic components meaning it was beyond repair...and no I didn't find any belts that needed replacing. So upon calling the tech center at Centurytel I was sent another Netopia DSL modem... it arrived quickly just two days later...upon plugging in the new modem I was greated with the wonderful no connectivity greeting which I became intimitly familiar with from this point on... so another call to Centurytel and was greated by a different tech center employee, who by the way all sounded the same in a low monotoned voice that was warm yet errie. So after I was guided through a series of commands with names like ipconfig reset, winsock and so forth. Then I asked the silly question of if my ethernet card was bad...and the reply came back of "that's what were're trying to figure out"... ok .... then I got a pause and then the tech guru requested that I should contact Dell (the maker of the computer) to find out more. Well upon calling Dell I was greated by an auto phone system and after pressing a series of 1's and 2's I was greeted by a nice Indian fellow whom asked for a few numbers off the side of the computer and then told me he couldn't help me as my warranty was expired...ok what might I do I asked... well for 50 bucks we can get you tech help... I said no thanks and hung up. After all the internet is full of information...no if I could only acess it...well worked helped out with that...needless to say the last couple of day's weren't too productive. But I was able to find the information that Centurytel walked me through the day before along with some additional help of removing various drivers associated with the Ethernet Card...which I found out isn't a card in teh computer but it's actually integrated with the motherboard so a simple swapout couldn't be done. But I learned that I could add an aditional ethernet card....so I would leave that for a last resort. Ok so after contacting dell I waited tell the next evening as I'd found some new drivers for the ethernet ect that I wanted to try out.... well they didn't help so off to the wonderful Centurytel tech center I went...this time Johnny (a nice chap that sounded the same as all the others with that calm monotoned voice) tried to help me out...after a half hour he transfered me to his Senior Tech... and after he went over everything the other techs did he decided to send me another DSL modem on the likely chance that it's the modem... well I got tired of waiting so I went to best buy (or the store I refer to as Ripoff....oposite of Best Buy...long story) and bought an off the shelf Dynex PCI Adapter... installed and 5 minutes later We're on the net again... hense the reason Centurytel couldn't whip it's way out of a wet paper sack with it's technoknowhow... shouldn't the DSL guru's know what the hecks going on... oh well... my ramblings are done and just for fun I think I'll call Centurytel and have some fun tomorrow when the other modem arrives... that will be 3 Netopia modems ... Poor Centruytel techno guru's.... now all I have to do is get them to fork over the money to repair my computers integrated ethernet componets that there Netopia modem fried.