Sunday, November 28, 2004

What we have here....

is a failure to communicate.

I fixed the problem with IE showing the wrong release number. I guess it would be more accurate to say I sidestepped it. What I did was to find where in the registry it was listing that old release number, and change it to the new one. Hey presto, things related to that started working. I ignored the fact that there are about ten other places the old number still exists. What I should do is delete or rename that whole key, then see what happens. And maybe someday I will.

But right now, and for the last four hours, I've been trying to get the damn thing to dial out, and been totally unsuccessful. If I connect it to the router, and thence to the cable modem, all is well. But if I disconnect that and either plug my external modem into the serial port or plug a phone line into the COM port, nada. No dial, no lights, no noise, no nothing.

What Dell tells me is that the modem is working fine -- the Query Modem command makes it spit back messages -- and I am willing to believe that. But it is as useful as a rock, because it just won't dial out. Got something to do with that COM port -- a misconfiguration somewhere. Its driving me so nuts, I'm going to go into the office to work tomorrow -- because I know that if I stay here, I will want to keep diddling with it.

Gah. Thanks, Mike.

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