A while back, I decided to reorganise my computer desk at home and my cable modem ended up plugged into the USB 2.0 card I have installed, rather than the standard USB port.
For some reason, this caused XP(home) to detect it and install it again and for the next couple of weeks I had really awful problems getting online - the network connection associtated with the modem would appear and disappear repeatedly; occasionally, its reappearance would cause the OS to detect and install the modem again.
The upshot was that in the device manager, I can see five cable modems instead of only one - through experimentation, it seems like some kind of conflict or competition between them all was the source of the connection probs, as it cleared up very nicely when I disabled all but one of them.
Anyway, I’ve decided that I want to attach the cable modem to my PC by the Ethernet port that I’ve just installed (chiefly to free up the USB), but the modem driver installation won’t let me proceed unless I first uninstall the existing installed instances of the cable modem, which would be fine, except that Windows won’t let me, saying that the device may be required to boot the machine.
I’ve tried booting into safe mode and it’s the same story there.
the usb port can have many functions and you should not need nor want to remove the drivers for it.
For the new ethernet you simply need to make sure you do not get a conflict when you install it.
Assuning no conflicts then re-run your internet connection wizard after you have the ethernet installed.
Sorry, I meant to add…
If you have a conflict try disabling any unused serial ports or if your prinbter is working through the usb then disable the printer port also.
I don’t want to remove the USB port or the drivers for it.
My cable modem is connected to my USB port and I want to remove it from there and connect it to the Ethernet port instead (the cable modem supports both methods of connectivity) - the driver for the Ethernet connectivity will not install until the driver for the USB connectivity is uninstalled - I have five entries in my device manager that say “Cable modem”; Windows will not allow me to uninstall them.
The modem is described by Windows as an Ambit USB Cable Modem 351000 (the label on the device itself doesn’t look like it holds much useful info) - my ISP is NTL Home.
I hope I’m not insulting your intelligence here, but are these drivers perchance provided by your ISP? If so, you probably don’t need them at all. Windows XP has native functionality for most cable and DSL modems, even PPPOE if you’re unlucky enough to have that config.
Have you gone to add/remove programs to try to remove the drivers and/or ISP software?
I find it strange that your cable modem would require any drivers at all. If your NIC is configured for DHCP, it should be able to get an IP from the modem without extra software.
I would just connect the cable modem to the NIC, open “my network places”, and under network tasks, select "set up and home or small office network. It should work automagically.
I hadn’t thought of looking in the installed programs dialog :smack:
You’re probably right about the NIC connection; I have a feeling that the ‘install’ process only installs drivers if you’re connecting by USB - if you branch the other way in the installation process, maybe it just configures the Windows network properties.
I thought I’d post back here to detail the resolution of this problem, in case anyone with similar difficulties searches in the future.
The reason that Windows wouldn’t let me uninstall some things was that the ‘devices’ I was trying to uninstall were the Cable Modem Packet Scheduler Miniport entries for the accompanying Cable Modem devices, which weren’t showing because they were not present (in the physical sense) - even clicking ‘show hidden items’ didn’t reveal the entries for the non-present extra instances of the modem.
Anyway, I asked the same question at Experts Exchange and someone suggested:
Which worked a charm - the greyed icons of the non-present modem device instances became visible and uninstalling them all was easy.
I actually uninstalled all of them, including the working instance and connected to the modem by ethernet; there was nothing to configure - just switch it on and away we go.
It seems that all those dead entries in the device manager were also causing problems of their own - the machine is very conspicuously faster to boot and to shut down and seems faster in general use, although this might be wishful thinking.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread.