Since we were upgraded to the 10 meg service, there have been a number of problems with the connection freezing. Reset the cable modem by pulling out the power cable, and it starts working again fine immediately. Having jumped through the hoops held by NTL’s broadband tech support such as swapping the ethernet cable, trying it with a single PC instead of the small home network, and insisting that it only started happening since the upgrade, we finally managed to get an engineer out.
His first words on finding out that we were on the 10 meg service were something along the lines of “I’ll probably have to swap the cable modem, these old ones seem to have problems with the higher speed.”
A quick test of the line, exchange the cable modem, and phone up someone to get the MAC address associated with our account changed, and within minutes it was working again and has been for a day now.
If you have a silver ntl branded cable modem (100/200 model) and your 10 meg service is flaky at best, persuade tech support to get an engineer out to swap it for one of the black 250 models.
I had my modem changed for the Black 250 model because of the freezing problem, the engineer tested the line and said my signal was to strong and reset it, since then it is still the same still keeps freezing and he said if it keeps doing the same it will be something on my machine causing the problem, but i never had this problem till i was upgraded to 10meg !
Assuming you’re using the ethernet port on the modem and not the USB port, you might want to check your ethernet card if it’s a separate PCI card. It might be that the card was perfectly happy with slower speeds but jumping to 10 meg generates too many interrupts (going on errors I’ve seen in Linux) when taking advantage of the speed increase.
Hi Simon, Yes i do use the ethernet connection it is a 10\100\1000 ethernet Lan, It runs for hours on end then just stops, i get maybe 12 hours then nothing, i unplug the modem power turn pc off, and when the nodem is reset and i reboot everything is fine again, not to much of a problem but a real pain when your doing something, i find its just the browser that freezes if i am downloading a big file when the browser stops working the download keeps going untill i reboot, i am no expert on computers so i dont know anything else to try but maybe as you say simon its the ethernet that dont like the speed, i have bookmarked this page incase anyone else have any ideas, thanks for the prompt reply.
Brian in Cheshire
Brian,
If your PC is still downloading when the browser freezes then the connection to the internet is fine and you have no problems with the lan card.
I would do a spyware scan using 3 different products, i.e adaware se, spybot and the microsoft antispyware offering. I would also check for viruses with a decent scanner and then if all this does nothing to yield improvements think about re-installing the operating system as you could have a browser hijacker installed and would need to re-install internet explorer.
Hi Again Simon
I did try a few different spyware scanners and everything looked ok, so i left it at that but thigs got a lot worse on the freeze and was having to reboot more and more often, in the end i was booting near every hour but as you say i was still downloading ok it was just my Browser that was freezing and i tryed all sorts of stuff still the same, then i sent a file to a friend of mine and he said there was a few nasty bits in the file and he was running PC-Cillin so i went to trend micro website and did a Free scan (housekeeping) and bugger me it found 41 problems so i then bought PC Cillin and as of the last two days i have not had a problem (touch wood) i will let you know in a few days how things have gone on as its always handy to let others know your findings, Thanks again Simon
Best regards
Brian
PS the scanners i tried before i bought PC-Cillin
was (1)Spyware Doctor (bought and paid for 2 years)
(2) spy sweeper, (3) Ad-Aware Pro SE,
Hi Simon, well its near two weeks now and i have kept this machine clean from all sorts of nasty’s and i have not had to reboot the modem at all so that must be the problem with the browser freezing, so thanks for your help and hope this info is of some use to others, i will keep poping back now and then to see how things are, all the best.
Brian