Another reason to dislike Windows

So I arrived down here at my parent's house in Florida. They were having network problems - it turned out tobe nothing more complicated than a bad cable. After we figured that out, my machine refused to see the network. I tried ipconfig /renew. I tried rebooting. Then I took a close look at the IP address. For some reason, my machine was trying to use the IP address it had been issued the last time I connected to the Cincom network in Cincinnati! This, even though I had:

• Rebooted twice
• Disconnected and reconnected the wire
• Used ipconfig /renew

The reboots alone should have cleared it, but no..... Finally, I tried the following:

• ipconfig /release
• ipconfig /renew

After the second reboot. That finally worked. Now, I'm no fan of Linux on the desktop, but - had this been Linux, I could have gone into the appropriate rc directory and typed ./network restart - and it all would have worked. So anyone want to explain to me why two reboots didn't clear the stupid network settings?