First a little history. I have been using a broadband provider called Foresite Wireless for several years because there was no other service available in my area.

It works great. I love it.

However, my phone bill is huge because of the type of service I require along with the DirecTV service which isnt cheap either.

Now that a cable broadband connection is available in my town, I broke down and ordered Comcasts Triple Play package a couple of weeks ago. It gives me phone, TV, and broadband for $99 per month for a year. It is $137per month after that. It works out to about $100 per month savings for me after the first year. What a deal.

I was told by Comcast that my service would be installed last Tuesday between noon and 2 P.M.

When they did not show and I called them I was told that AT&T did not release my phone number so the order was cancelled. I had to place the order all over again and was told that the installation would be in one week, which is today.

I was kind of mad because I had cancelled my DirecTV account about an hour before they were to arrive. So, now my daughter did not have any TV for a week!

Did you ever watch the X-Men DVDs over and over again? She did. I wanted to move out of the house it was so bad.

Anyway, Comcast shows up today to do the install 3 hours early. Ok. Im home.

The phone and TV connections went well. It was the broadband where we had a problem.

My house is prewired for phone, data, video and audio. I told them to install it all to one connection in the basement. That I would extend the connections through my central panel later.

They used my laptop to configure the broadband. When they wanted to install software on my machine running XP, I told them they can not do that because I dont want their crap on my machine.

They told me that because of the phone hookup it was required to configure the cable model to do telephone correctly. I still argued. They won because they offered to leave without finishing the phone if they didnt get to install the software.

When they did I noticed that it hijacked my IE7 with Comcast logos, installed McAfee Security, and installed something called Desktop Doctor.

I was getting pretty upset with them, telling them they just messed my my computer. They did not believe me, so I showed them the slow down because there were now 2 anti-virus programs and that the browser now looks different.

As installers would naturally say, they had never seen that before, it must be my computer.

I explained to them that their profession was installing Comcast products, mine was servicing Windows based computers and that I think I know my profession a little better then they did.

They left and I had a two hour project cleaning up my laptop.

The moral of the story is this. Windows XP and Vista have everything needed to communicate with any network in the world, including the Internet.

Comcast tech support says that if you call during an installation, they can register you and make any configuration changes to the cable modem from their end. This means no software needs to be installed.