poly4life
01-06-2005, 11:08 PM
I thought I might pass this along. I got a house call from a frustrated customer who couldn't connect to the Internet on her broadband service. She was on the phone for 3 hours with some person in India, she had difficulty understanding the rep - apparently the person wasn't very knowledgable, they charged her a nice fat fee for the tech support, and they still didn't fix the problem! That's where I came in.
She told me that the reps said it was her on-board LAN adapter needed to be reinstalled. The rep claimed this required installing the drivers for two devices in Device Manager to remedyy the problem. I saw a failed installation for PCI Simple Communications Controller, as there were no drivers present on the system.
I haven't seen this error in some time, and I recalled this controller corresponds to mainly modems but also NICS. I decided to reinstall her on-LAN anyway and see what happens. Nothing. I tried to think how can this be blocking the Internet. She has no home network; only one PC for the Internet exists. And it certainly wasn't some type of proxy device for her on-LAN connection.
I checked out her winsock and it was messed up. She runs ad-aware reguarly, but she may have had malware or something else entirely. I rebuilt her winsock and everything worked fine. The said PCI controller was a speakermodem, a feature part of her cable modem.
She told me that the reps said it was her on-board LAN adapter needed to be reinstalled. The rep claimed this required installing the drivers for two devices in Device Manager to remedyy the problem. I saw a failed installation for PCI Simple Communications Controller, as there were no drivers present on the system.
I haven't seen this error in some time, and I recalled this controller corresponds to mainly modems but also NICS. I decided to reinstall her on-LAN anyway and see what happens. Nothing. I tried to think how can this be blocking the Internet. She has no home network; only one PC for the Internet exists. And it certainly wasn't some type of proxy device for her on-LAN connection.
I checked out her winsock and it was messed up. She runs ad-aware reguarly, but she may have had malware or something else entirely. I rebuilt her winsock and everything worked fine. The said PCI controller was a speakermodem, a feature part of her cable modem.