replacing aging hardware

I bought a new cablemodem. Each morning this week, the
cablemodem was down until lunch time. last night it went down too. today it
never came back on. From what I hear, they actually wear out slowly and
sporadically… they will just start getting flakey, rather than die all at
once. The old cablemodem was still flashing orange lights when I unplugged it and put the new one in. it took a couple minutes for the new one to get all
green lights, then at first it handed me a private IP address. so I called the
cable company (Mediacom) and they had to register the new cablemodem’s MAC address. It even seems faster than the old one. here’s the speed:

Speed Test #41331191 by dslreports.com
Run: 2007-12-06 19:15:35 EST
Download: 7386 (Kbps)
Upload: 478 (Kbps)
In kilobytes per second: 901.6 down 58.4 up
Tested by server: 54 java
User: 2 @ dslreports.com
User’s DNS: mchsi.com
Compared to the average of 158 tests from mchsi.com:
* download is 65% better