The cable modem was installed this morning and worked straight away on the Vista laptop. In fact it was installed so quick after ordering that I haven’t even received any documentation on the DNS or mail servers or any other setup stuff through the regular mail yet.

TV programs seemed to be loaded within seconds but as there’s squat else on the laptop I couldn’t check much else, well I suppose I could have downloaded a movie with bittorrent but I thought I’d do all that kind of testing on the 2 desktop PC’s. I got a Belkin cable DSL router in the afternoon and followed the instructions to install the software first. I disabled the wireless connection on the laptop then ran setup for the router. The first thing it tried to do was to talk to the cable modem, and it failed. Turned off the Defender firewall, eventually, but setup could still not talk to the router. Rebooted everything and still no joy.

Then I thought I’d have a look at the small print and realised that the router wasn’t Vista compatible. Vista could see the cable modem but the router software couldn’t. OK, lets try the router software, which is XP compatible, with the XP desktop PC. As the cable modem is in the TV room and the XP PC is in a room about 40 feet away I had to move the XP PC to the TV room first. Did that and did it work. No. Seems that the XP PC’s ethernet port is not working, well not as far as XP’s Device Manager is concerned.

Ho-bloody-hum. The best laid plans…………. OK tomorrow the Vista incompatible cable router goes back to the shop and I get a Vista compatible version.

In preparation for the installation of the broadband cable modem I thought I’d throw the laptop to the wolves and unleash a Windows update at it and see if it had any luck in installing anything. This is an underpowered laptop running Vista Ultimate so I wasn’t expecting anything like SP1 to get installed. If a couple of months of Vista updates manage to stick then the laptop was also going to be thrown in the direction of the cable modem, when installed, to see how it gets along with that.

There were a couple of months worth of Vista updates to be applied, which took ages, but were finally installed OK and then all of a sudden there was a new installable update displayed on screen, all by itself – Vista Service Pack 1. I’d heard from someone that they had tried installing it and it had appeared to get to about 95% through the install process when it undid all its good work and rolled itself back.

Well I suppose I could give it a try. So I did, and it worked. Took an hour or two and needed 2 maybe 3 reboots but when I checked the update history it was there in all it’s glory, SP1 successfully installed. Now I’ve just got to figure out if I can tell any difference now that it’s gone all shiny again.

I phoned the cable company again about their 20mb broadband service and got a slightly different story to the first call.

To ensure I understood exactly how it works I asked some pretty dumb and straightforward questions but managed to get some good answers. First off ‘Where do I plug the cable modem in?’. They give you some kind of splitter and you connect the cable modem to the cable for the TV, with the splitter. Well that made sense, except that the cable’s in the wrong room. Then ‘How do I connect a laptop to the cable modem?’. The answer was that they give you an ethernet cable. Oh. Then ‘It’s not wireless then?’. Nope (Well that’s 2 steps back. Ed). The guy did say that you can get a cable DSL router for wireless connectivity.

I had a look at a couple of sites and you can get a cable router for about $60 so that’s not so bad. I started looking at the specs of these routers and for about $120 you can get them with a greater range, I think one of them said it had a range of up to 100 meters which beats the whatsit out of our puny 50 foot range. I assume the cable router connects to the cable modem by a erm a …cable.

So what have we got? Cable access give me a 20mb fat pipe, no download limit (Oh yeah, use the BBC iPlayer 24 hours a day and we’ll see about that. Ed) and about 6 times the range I currently have. Hmmm…no brainer.

I phoned the cable company to sign on and asked for it to be installed by one of their guys, if for no other reason than I can pick his brain about this stuff. Being plumbed in tomorrow morning.

The good thing about it being a cable modem connection is that we can have that running in parallel with our existing BT ADSL connection so I can spend a few weeks testing the darn thing, before I pull the plug on BT, and making sure the Internet radio’s and iPhone work OK with it.

Now what can go wrong?