How to prevent your modem from getting 'bricked'

[drewmerc]

i understand your problem as a noob, and yes i forget what it was like back when i started (the fear)
but understand it's very hard to do a true brick (there's debrick commands for jtags that can bit-bang when you really do a fuck up job on the, bit-banging normaly means you need a usb based jtag)
as long as you got a good modem (moto/webby) so you can have both jtag and serial (this does help alot for trouble shooting)
a well built set of wires (jtag and serial) and a multimeter (cheap shit will do as long as it beeps) to test the connections
this is every thing you need

static ip (yes in windows)
power cycles (just like how you never pull the plug from a computer off when its writing to the hard disk, writing to the memory at the same time as rebooting is never good)