Hooking up a second machine to your Comcast internet connection
7 September, 2011 § 5 Comments
I signed up for Comcast internet a few months ago and was quite disturbed to learn that connecting to the internet required installing their Comcast Internet software.
Visually, their software doesn’t do anything except for change your Firefox homepage (and if you are on a Mac, then it will make it so you can’t change it back) and add a bunch of shortcuts to your desktop.
I brought my work computer home today and tried to connect to my wired Ethernet connection. While my desktop computer had a good connection, my laptop didn’t. No matter what, I wasn’t going to install the Comcast crapware on another machine. After much digging through preferences, I couldn’t find anything that Comcast actually changed related to networking. My other idea was that their software simply registers your MAC addresss with their server.
After copying my desktop machine’s MAC address to my laptop, the connection succeeded.
TLDR; if you are trying to connect another machine to your Comcast connection (or a router for that matter), just clone the MAC address.
JAWS 
[…] I signed up for Comcast internet a few months ago and was quite disturbed to learn that connecting to the internet required installing their Comcast Internet software. Visually, their software doesn't do anything except for change your Firefox homepage (and if you are on a Mac, then it will make it so you can't change it back) and add a bunch of shortcuts to your desktop. I brought my work computer home today and tried to connect to my wired Ethe … Read More […]
[…] Posted by Matt Black I signed up for Comcast internet a few months ago and was quite disturbed to learn that connecting to the internet required installing their Comcast Internet software. Visually, their software doesn't do anything except for change your Firefox homepage (and if you are on a Mac, then it will make it so you can't change it back) and add a bunch of shortcuts to your desktop. I brought my work computer home today and tried to connect to my wired Ethe … Read More […]
Interesting, when I used to have comcast I never had to install any software, I just plugged in my router and moved on.
Yeah, that’s what I remember too. I spent a couple hours unplugging and plugging in cables when I first Comcast out here with no luck. Using their CD seemed to make it work. I hope there is a way to completely get rid of their CD. I’ve uninstalled everything that it installed originally.
Wow. Yeah I wouldn’t want comcast on my machine.