Mysterious Internet FAIL

[dreadpyrat]

Hi all, my internet up and died the other night. Comcast, my Cable Internet provider, cannot detect anything wrong with my connection.

Here is my setup:

Comcast Cable Internet to Comcast provided Cable Modem
Buffalo Link Station Live NAS
Belkin 150N Wi-Fi Router
1 DELL Laptop
1 HP Laptop
Both run 32bit Vista

And he is what happened:

I was watching a movie from the NAS to my X360 (hardwired via USB) when the internet connection suddenly failed. To isolate the problem, I removed the NAS and the Router from the equation.

Using a CAT5 cable, I connected the Dell Laptop directly to the Modem. All Modem lights were on and green. After going thru several resets of the Modem (hard reboot, IP refreshing, etc.), the Dell will connect to the internet. After rebooting the laptop however, the entire process must be repeated to get the internet to work again.

I then connected the CAT5 cable to the HP machine and performed the same process to get connected to the internet. It also connected but the internet is SO slow it can take something like 10 minutes to load a page as simple as Google.The Modem lights are all on and green here as well.

Comcast tech support insists the problem is not theirs but I'm thinking this might be the Cable Modem. Any thoughts?

Also, why would one laptop, once connected, have no internet connectivity issues while the other would be absurdly slow?

Any help is MUCH appreciated!

[johnwill]

Once you have connected directly to the cable modem successfully, you should not have to power cycle the modem to make a connection again. If that's what's happening, the modem has a problem. The only time you need to power cycle is when you change the attached device to clear out the MAC address of the previously connected device.

[dreadpyrat]

Thank you JohnWill! I had a feeling it was the modem. I'll have Comcast bring me a new one and see if that does the trick. Thanks so much for the advice!

[johnwill]

No problem, that's what we do here.