Went to see a client that was having problems connecting her ADSL modem (to her laptop).

It was a new connection & she was looking to move away from dialup.

I had just started getting some flu symptoms, so I wasn’t feeling to good (which might be why I didn’t fix this problem as quickly as I would have liked).

The carrier is Optus & while running the standard modem install utility, I’d get an error message about not being able to complete the modem setup.

The client had already spent a few hours on the phone to Optus, to try to get ADSL working, but was told that there must be something wrong with her laptop, or the ADSL connection is outside of the allowable range.

Any web site would give the “IE is unable to link to the web page requested”

After some poking around, I managed to ping google.com.au, so it looked like I was onto the net… but web pages would still not work… and a short while after that, the ping would also stop working… very peculiar.

Event viewer didn’t show anything wrong, but the system seemed a bit slow…

I eventually decided that the best thing to do would be to take the laptop home & try it with my ADSL connection.

Once home, I still couldn’t get the laptop to load web pages, but the ping results were more consistent: ping would always work.

So now I focused on IE & why it wouldn’t work. The answer ended up being trivial: internet options -> connections -> lan setting -> proxy server: had some weird settings. I just disabled proxy server, & everything just worked. I reckon Optus should had been able to fix this, since they deal with ADSL customers day-in, day-out)

I did some defrag, & disabled useless “utilities” from startup, then took it back.

Now things were working better: ping worked all the time (but the modem seems to have a dodgy power connector… touching it sometimes caused it to go “offline”).

Opening any web page caused a Telstra page to appear (basically saying “I don’t recognise your username & password, so I won’t let you look at the page you want).

It turns out that the client tried to get broadband thru Telstra, but couldn’t get it to work, so she switched to Optus, with the same symptoms, so then she called me.

I rang Optus on her behalf, & found out that Telstra had not “released” the ADSL service (they were meant to do it 2 day prior, but hadn’t). Optus escalated the issue.

Rang the client a few days later & she was very happy, as the connection was fixed the day after I was there.