We have Time Warner bundled for cable and internet and then use Vonage for telephone and have been fine, but we do have a cell phone as backup. Vonage had the advantage of being both cheaper than Time Warner telephone service and not partitioning off bandwidth. It gives us a "land line" for faxing and minutes since we have a cheap low minute cell phone plan.

Anyone good at writing DOS scripts? I want a .bat file that I can execute with a right-click (using the "send to" menu) that will create a copy of the selected file, with the year, month and date appended to the end of the file name, like so:

filetobebackedup.extyymmdd

...with yymmdd being the current date.

No thoughts on ink cartridge purveyors?

I've been using these [link] for about six months with no trouble.

Okay, I am having Internet connectivity issues at home, and I am going to cry. I am at work now and hoping the situation resolves itself magically, but if it does not, I need help.

Last night, I shut down my computer. This morning, I turned it on. The only weird variable is that I had just installed an AVG update that required me to restart; I had not restarted until the shutdown.

All my modem lights were on. Outlook Express downloaded my mail. Yahoo! Messenger connected.

NOTHING ELSE WORKED.

AIM wouldn't connect. AVG Update wouldn't connect. Windows Update wouldn't download. Firefox and IE could not load webpages; they were continually "waiting."

I called Comcast, and they reset my modem. Last week, I had a similar issue, and resetting the modem fixed it. This time, it did not help. The tech guy had me restart my computer after he reset the modem, and that didn't help. I reset my IP address (release, renew), and I was able to ping with no problem (and for some reason, AIM connected, but after I released and renewed again, it didn't). But nothing else would connect. No browers, no AVG, no Windows Update, no Semagic. Waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, never loading.

Curiously, Remote Desktop worked fine.

The Comcast guy was at a loss. From his end, he saw that I had a strong signal, so he didn't know why only a few programs were connecting. It seemed to me like only certain ports were open or something.

My Local Area Network settings look fine, too. It says I'm sending and receiving with no problem. Yet, my programs aren't using the connection for some fucking reason.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? Anyone have any idea what's going on and why this randomly happened and how I can fix it? Please?

I would suggest trying Malwarebytes to scan and see if some piece of malware is messing with your connections assuming you can get the installer on your computer via flash drive or something. Maybe something got by AVG. The symptoms sound a bit dodgy.

[link]

After double checking for malware, maybe turn off any firewalls just to see if maybe a software firewall went rogue.

My Windows Firewall is off, and I disabled Norton, and that didn't help. I'll try Malwarebytes, though.

It's just bizarre because everything was working fine until I restarted. And I had a similar issue last week without restarted; I just woke up, and my connectivity was funky. But resetting the modem fixed that problem. So I don't know whether the two are related or not.

But resetting the modem fixed that problem. So I don't know whether the two are related or not.

I'd say not. Unless the modem has its own firewall, it should either let everything through or nothing. It really does sound like only certain ports are getting through, which would be a PC issue. I'm not an expert in this, but a virus/trojan is the only thing that comes to mind.

Do you have another computer you could try on that modem? Perhaps a friend could bring a laptop?

Do you have a router? I'm under the impression that having a router with packet forwarding offers much better security than a software firewall....

I don't have a router. I don't have another computer, but I could try the modem on a neighbor's laptop. But it doesn't sound like the modem is the problem because the computer is recognizing connectivity; something's just keeping programs from connecting.

AVG didn't find anything yesterday, but it hadn't finished installing the latest update, and everything was working. Maybe if I run it now after the potential virus is active, it'll find it?

GAH GAH MOTHERFUCKING GAH. How did this happen? Goddammit. The last major thing I downloaded was the AVG update.

uninstall AVG and try to connect.

Zonealarm (years ago) screwed with a few programs I was using to connect to the internet - selectively - and I had to bail on that.