General Verizon DSL Question

[vagnozzi]

I was cleaning up a neighbor's computer, they were having trouble with many pop-ups/viruses, etc...

Well I used adaware and took a load of shit off, and McAfee 8 removed a slew of virii, some it couldn't remove, ANYWAY...

The system was way f'd up and had virtually no windows xp updates and still SP1. I'm restoring their HP machine and putting the antivirus/updates on right away to ensure proper use of their machine. For their Verizon DSL, do I have to configure anything, or should it automatically connect like my cable modem?

They have a username/password to connect to Verizon DSL, but I thought you don't need that if its a broadband connection?

 

[AllThingsGeek]

this depends on the type of DSL modem that they are using.
in all reality, DSL is really just a very fast dial-up connection. DSL uses the same dial-up method of authentication as we remember from normal modem dial-up authentication (username and password). the only difference is that your DSL modem will do this in the background and authenticate intermittently without the user even knowing whats going on in the background. this protocol going on in the background is called either PPoA or PPoE and it totally different than they way a cable modem communicates to a ISP. anyway, the point is, back to the "depends on the type on DSL modem" i mentioned before. some DSL modems carry this username and password in their internal configuration and others rely on the username and password to be setup within the operating system. you DEFINATLY want to keep this information though. connect the computer to the DSL modem and just see if it works. if it does, then the configuration is most likely within the DSL modem itself and everything should already be there from before. if not, then you will have to either setup the dial-up networking session manuall with the username and password or run a Verizon setup CD that the user should have after purchasing the DSL account.

 

[vagnozzi]

Thanks for the reply.

I set it all up, used the username/password and DSL setup nicely. I just have one more question, why does it make a broadband connection to Verizon and say its connected, and at the same time my local area connection says 'Limited or No Connectivity'.

I mean, everything works fine and internet is ok, why will my local area connection display this message if everything is ok?

 

[AllThingsGeek]

i'm a little confused. are you using wired? or wireless? or mixed wit both?

 

[vagnozzi]

The computer is wired directly to the dsl modem, a westell 2200.

The LAN connection says "limited/no", but the Verizon broadband connection says 100Mbps, and internet is fine. If its wired, will it not matter?

Internet is ok, I found a patch specifically for SP2 for this problem, but I'm not going to install it because the internet is fine.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...d2-5034-4bbb-b74d-ad8430a1f7c8&DisplayLang=en

I've seen other people have this same problem, but they were running wireless and had problems. This works fine though, weird, eh?

 

[AllThingsGeek]

this is specifically for wireless. i would say that you are fine. i, too, do not update anything from microsoft unless it's broken to begin with or functioning less than required efficiency