| Cable's Trouble with Microsoft Windows XP |
While the musician Sting wooed New Yorkers on October 25, singing the start of a $1 bil. marketing campaign by Microsoft Corp. for its new, XP operating system, cable technologists were bracing for a different kind of sting: Service calls from unhappy cable modem customers.
As it turns out, there's a good chance that high-speed Internet customers using cable modems that latch to the personal computer with a USB (Universal Serial Bus) connector, and who upgrade to Windows XP, could get a pretty spooky error message.
The message, in part: "Continuing your installation of this software may impair or destabilize the correct operation of your system, either immediately or in the future ... Microsoft strongly recommends that you stop this installation now and contact the hardware vendor for software that has passed Windows Logo testing."
Yikes.
It's bad news either way. Aborting the upgrade means customers don't get whichever XP features they found useful enough to initiate the upgrade in the first place. Continuing means that, after completion, XP refuses to acknowledge the USB-connected cable modem, making it behave as though it were suddenly dead - even though it responds normally when "pinged" from the headend.
At the root of it is the software driver loaded on the installation disks of USB cable modems. Drivers are electronic lists that describe any device trying to attach to a computer. They say: This is who I am (a cable modem made by so-and-so); This is the port I'm connecting on (USB); This is what I do (attach to the Internet.)
All "peripheral" hardware - "peripheral" meaning it didn't necessarily come with the PC -- has a software driver. That includes printers, video monitors, joysticks, scanners, cable modems, DSL modems, phone modems. (This means USB cable modems aren't the only things affected. Your friends on the DSL side are having similar woes.)
Here's the thing: Most, if not all, drivers for USB cable modems were written to run on residential-use PC operating systems, which means they speak in 16-bit, "unprotected" mode. XP, on the other hand, is the first residential-use PC operating system to speak in 32-bit "protected" mode - and that mode refuses to acknowledge the earlier one.
What's being "protected" in Windows XP's 32-bit mode is the PC's memory, and how it gets used. Surely you've been in this situation, somewhere along the way: You're running Word, Excel, a graphics program, and e-mail. You do something, and suddenly your PC goes kaflooey. Nothing works. You have to turn it off and back on again.
XP's 32-bit "protected mode" fixes this. Each application is given a fixed amount of memory, and isn't allowed to know or move beyond those boundaries. A rogue application can't bring down your entire system - and all the work you may have open (and, as Murphy's Law dictates, probably unsaved.)
So there's your treasured high-speed Internet customer, trying to upgrade to XP, and using a USB cable modem. When XP tries to read the USB driver, it sees only a 16-bit version. XP says no. Maybe it prompts your customer to load the CD-ROM that holds the drivers for the USB cable modem, to see if there's a 32-bit version on board.
But in most, if not all cases, there isn't. In a fairly understandable oversight, cable modem manufacturers believed, at the time USB drivers were created, that anyone running a 32-bit operating system would be a corporate user, and that corporate users would go with Ethernet connectivity, not USB. (Ethernet-connected cable modems work just fine with XP.)
Here's what has to happen for this whole situation to be resolved: Cable modem manufacturers must send their 32-bit drivers to Microsoft for certification. (Most have done so.) Then, the modem suppliers send those new drivers to cable MSOs, for use in instances just such as this.
Ordinarily, a customer could visit the Web site of the manufacturer to download the new driver. But that's sort of hard to do if the only device capable of connecting to the Internet is behaving as though it is dead.
Alternative number two: The MSO hand-delivers or mails a new installation disk to the USB cable modem user, so that the approved, 32-bit USB driver can be loaded and recognized as good by XP.
The good news is, there really aren't that many USB cable modems out there right now. And, XP is expected to be more momentous with new PC sales, not upgrades to existing PCs. So the call volume for affected cable modem customers is likely to be fairly small. But nonetheless, forewarned is forearmed.
This column originally appeared in the Broadband Week section of Multichannel News.