BTW if anyone wants to chime in and lend a hand, feel free.

Sure... how about using USB?

Not to be a luddite or anything, but if you're plugging the Empeg directly into your PC, why even bother with ethernet at all? At that point, you might as well use USB. It's sure a lot simpler than trying to get ethernet running. The USB just works, but configuring an ethernet setup is, despite Microsoft's valiant efforts to simplify things, still quite complicated. And this may surprise you, but throwing a DSL connection into the mix makes it even worse, especially since your only use for ethernet has been that DSL thingy so far. Who knows how that stuff is set up compared to a "simple" peer-to-peer microsoft network connection?

Sure you get a bit of a speed boost with ethernet over USB. But the USB connection certainly isn't dog-slow by any measure, and ethernet isn't that much faster.

Now, if you say that you want to do software development on the unit, okay. If you want to turn the thing into an FTP server, cool. But remember that those things are orders of magnitude more complicated than getting a little ethernet connection running. Something tells me that you're not planning on doing those things.

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Tony Fabris