Road Runner Doesn't Do XP 438
PerlStalker writes: "Internet News has an article up that mentions, among other things, that Road Runner (owned primarily by AOL/TW) will not support XP. From the article: 'Road Runner, the second-largest cable Internet service provider (ISP) in the nation with more than 1.4 million subscribers, does not support the controversial new operating system (OS) for its customers and will not support its use on the cable network.'" Note that this doesn't stop customers from connecting to Road Runner from XP systems, but until their staff is trained specifically, Road Runner won't help them with technical problems arising from that combination.
Big deal (Score:3, Informative)
Non-Official support is mainly a way so that if they can't help you, it's not their fault. It dosen't mean they _wont_ help. (save for the time you get the ass-much tech support guy on the other side who keeps insisting that you need to reinstall your TCP/IP stack because thats what his computer tells him you need to do, but thats another rant)
-paul
Firewalls (Score:3, Informative)
What's surprising is not that RoadRunner staff won't interface to XP, but that they won't do installations with a firewall in place. Every time they want to debug something, they ask me to disconnect my firewall and attach my machine directly to the net. Of course, I don't. Fortunately, in my experience, the main thing that goes wrong with RoadRunner is that it "gets confused" and usually just "unplugging your cable modem for twenty minutes" has fixed me every time. Sigh.
This is not news. (Score:1, Informative)
I have just installed Win XP and I believe that they will offer support very quickly as it's network services are almost the exact same as its predecessor (Win2000).
EndersGame
Re:Happens all the time (Score:3, Informative)
RR is by far the best broadband I've had. I've had ISDN, DSL from 2 telcos, and @home. The news servers are pretty good, and I average about 15Meg per minute pulling from them. That's a LOT of porn!
Re:not really news... (Score:2, Informative)
BTW the current specs for RR support are as follows.
full support
windows 98
windows me
windows 2k
mac os 8.6 or better for classic
pent 166
32 MB ram
250 MB hd
best effort
anything under hardware spec
os x
windows xp
xp will supported a month from release as per previous history
Rogers @Home in Canada supports XP (Score:4, Informative)
Funny thing is, I called back a few days later, and the guy helped me. I mentioned the earlier call and he told me that they weren't going to support XP, but then Future Shop (a big PC retail chain in Canada) started shipping PCs bundled with the Rogers service and Windows XP.. and they had to start supporting it.
He said they got a few sheets of paper with some screenshots and that was it - limited support, but still, better than being told to go away.
Funny thing is, XP's TCP/IP support is fairly well set up to help the tech support guys - if you go into the properties for the network connection there's a tab that's got a summary of all the connection's settings and a "Repair" button that resets the interface and renews the DHCP lease..
- Steve
Why they're not supporting XP yet... (Score:2, Informative)
There isn't some horrible conspiracy - it's just that they have to test XP and make sure support's ready to guide people through it (as was mentioned in the newspost, but I don't think immediately gathered).
It may have a lot of similarities to Windows 2000, but strictly speaking the GUI is pretty different. I work tech support, and we sometimes have problems even getting people to the Run command - imagine what it will be like when you have to check if someone's using the XP or classic Start menu (so certain icons are in one place but not the other), whether they're using the simplified control panel or not... you get the idea.
There's also the problem of the code base - it's not going to be the same as for a 2000 user (and certainly not a 9x user). At work we've had people come in and complain of a mysterious slowdown, and then mention "oh, this happened just after I installed XP." They don't know if your hardware drivers might be poor for 2000/XP, whether it's something in the TCP/IP stack, or even just the drain on the OS from all the eye candy.
From what I've heard they may well have full-on support in about 30 days (this may change), but I don't think anyone here should accuse them of malice in that regard (now, the quality of support in a particular tier is a different matter...)
Re:Hrm (Score:5, Informative)
Another factor affecting our users is the USB driver situation. As of yet, Toshiba still hasn't finalized their XP drivers for their cable modems, so our users are having problems getting their USB connections setup (the Win2K drivers are for the most part compatible with XP, so it's not a huge issue). With 3COM, they don't even produce their cable modems anymore, so I'm not to optimistic about an XP driver being released. Basically, if a customer calls me wanting to get Road Runner installed and has XP, I tell them to get a network card (which is a good idea anyway).
I mean, technically we don't "support" networking. That doesn't mean you can't network your computers. All it means is that we don't do it for you and we can't help you troubleshoot them. However, if somebody calls in with a networking problem, I'm more than happy to help them to best of my ability (that's just me, other coworkers of mine will end the conversation with, "We don't support networks"). I'm the same way when it comes to older computers that don't meet the requirements to run the automated installation, Linux, etc. If I can help you, I will.
All in all, we support XP, it's just that you won't get the same level of support that you do with Windows 9x.
- chuckx | Charles K. Lee II -
- chuckx at cold-sun.com -
- http://www.cold-sun.com -
Re: PC Anywhere not supported? haha (Score:2, Informative)
Au contraire,
Re: PC Anywhere not supported? haha (Score:2, Informative)
While it's not as slick as terminal services, the Windows community has had Netmeeting Remote Desktop Sharing for quite a while now and it's a very slick product and already had mostly replaced pcAnywhere. I don't like seeing Microsoft putting companies out of business, but at the same time pcAnywhere was quite the POS : It's kernel level drivers guaranteed you fairly frequent BSODs, and there were brutal flaws in its scripting language that amazingly remained through many revisions of the product. Overall it just seemed like a "the least product we can deliver and make money" kinda deal.
Re:Not Supporting XP (Score:0, Informative)
who you talk to makes all the difference (Score:3, Informative)
1. the Customer Service/Tech Support person
2. the Cable T.V./Internet installer tech
3. the Computer/Network tech
If you get one of the first 2 you are most likely to have trouble getting beyond a script or simple proceedures that they have learned. These techs do not understand how computer systems and networks work, they only know how to do certain tasks that solve most problems. #3 is the guy who will be able to solve almost any problem.... the drawback is in order to get to #3 you usually have to go through one or both of the first 2, and there is good reason for that, techs of type 3 are in short supply and VERY busy.
...this is why as a cable company grows the tech support, if not taken care of properly goes to shit. in the early days the computer tech takes care of or oversees everything to do with computers, but eventually parts of that job get doled out to the installers and CSRs.
Yup ... I suffered this recently ... (Score:5, Informative)
By this time I'd already debugged the problem, both from inside and outside and knew exactly which of their routers was misconfigured
Eventually I bit my lip and borrowed a windows box - went thru voicemail hell, then had to be handheld through "are you sure you typed in you IP address correctly" "but I tell you your router needs it's tables fixed" proccess at least 3-4 times before we got to "I'll refer you to my 2nd tier support - they'll call you on monday" (they didn't - in the end I was down 6 days, up a day down 4 more days before they fixed the problem - I did the telephone hell thing 7 times before stuff came back)
Anyway one thing I realised - the people you call at the phone company when your line goes down know NOTHING about networking
It's pretty sad when your only usefull options for net connection consist of "the phone company" and "the cable company" - remember when you used to have a local ISP - and you could talk to someone who actually knows what they are doing
Re:Hrm (Score:2, Informative)
When Win2000 first came out and I had a problem (which wasn't on my end anyway) they said, "Windows 2000? We don't support that."
Until they have their staff trained, their official position is "We don't support it." You can use it of course, but they won't help you troubleshoot your connection with it.
Needless to say, they don't support Linux.
It's called Dynamic DNS... (Score:5, Informative)
*sigh*. I love it when people write conspiracy theories when it's really just a standard Dynamic DNS client that is poking around on the network.
Once again, this is a cool idea that Microsoft has implemented if your corporation uses nothing but Microsoft servers. (Note: this is the same dynamic DNS that is used by many websites to give you your own domain name, so you don't have to have a Microsoft server to support it. However, most regular DNS servers do not have this option enabled.) The dynamic DNS option is enabled by default, however, in Windows 2000, and it causes a waste of network services (to the point of becoming a DOS attack on a company's DNS servers) when those DNS servers do not support it. Here is more information (that I wrote when researching it for my company):
Windows 2000 supports something called Dynamic DNS (DDNS), which lets clients automatically update their own A records. This means that a DNS server supporting Dynamic DNS would be almost completely self-maintained, as whenever the computer connects or disconnects from the network, it adds/removes its own records. It basically completely eliminates the need for static IPs (except for things like web servers and such that touch the outside world.)
Unfortunately, Microsoft, in its blind Microsoft-only world, made Dynamic DNS registration turned on by default on all Windows 2000 clients, even in companies without a dynamic DNS server. This creates a lot of unnecessary traffic on the network as every time the computer connects or disconnects, it sends a little message to the DNS server. I've even been told (without proof) that it sends a request to every DNS server on its list, possibly upgrading the request all the way to the root server if it doesn't get its way with the first server on its list.
This had a lot of UNIX admins frightened about job security (my take: if you're sitting there all day updating DNS records, you better find some new job skills anyway) and it has evolved into a fascinating topic of research for me. Some pretty good takes on it can be found here:
(Yale: Making UNIX DNS servers and Windows 2000 play nice) [yale.edu]
(eWeek article from 1999 discussing Windows 2000 DDNS and the impact it has on UNIX DNS servers) [zdnet.com]
This is really interesting because it's one small facet of the many ways Microsoft is subtly pushing UNIX around. ("Hey! We have this cool thing implemented in Windows now! Fire your UNIX sysadmins and throw away your UNIX servers, because our servers are so much easier to maintain!")
That's not M$ bashing... (Score:2, Informative)
We support TCP/IP.
We support DHCP.
We support POP3/IMAP.
We support
Get it ? The rest is in the upper layers and is totally tranparent to what an ISP must provide. If you people have problems with XP and your ISP, it's M$ you should rely on not the ISP.
Road Runner is probably stating this to prevent flood of calls to their offices... ( Yes i believe that they will get tons of calls because of XP. )
Re:Happens all the time (Score:3, Informative)
On Windows XP you don't even need this. Windows XP comes with PPPoE support out of the box, and it interfaces properly with your other ethernet cards and doesn't set up one of those annoying virtual ethernet adaptors that break everything.
PPPoE support under Windows XP is quite cool. It's just like dialing up on a modem, only of course much quicker. And it works out of the box with NAT and all. Most of the PPPoE applications cringe with NAT software (mostly because they want to make it as difficult as possible to do NAT).