[TriLUG] [Very OT] AOL Broadband Problem

[Andrew Perrin]

Apologies in advance - I know it's way off topic.

I'm trying to get my in-laws' place in Carrboro set up right. They've got
three computers running various Windowses (1 XP Pro, 1 XP Home, 1 98SE)
and an SMC broadband router that connects them all to AOL broadband via
TWC cablemodem.

The two XP machines work fine. The 98 machine doesn't - it's networked
fine (can ping and share folders w/ the other two on the network and gets
its IP via DHCP from the broadband router), but it hangs while signing on
to AOL at "Step 3: Requesting Network Attention."  AOL tech support is
useless; they just say to reinstall the software, which does no good.

So I'm hoping someone here knows what might be going on. The computer is
somewhat old - I built it for them around 1997, and it was already
obsolete then. It's a Pentium 266, 128MB RAM, with plenty of hard disk
space. The ethernet is an onboard SiS900 chip, which seems to work fine.

Thanks for any advice.

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Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
clists at perrin.socsci.unc.edu * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu