Tethering an un-rooted Android Phone via USB - Windows 7, Linux

So here I was for 3 days trying to use a Bluetooth DUN connection that kept dropping every 5 mins or so to connect to The Internet using an Alcatel Android Phone. It was about to drive me nuts when I decided to try out USB tethering instead since I'm on a desktop (no WiLan card). This turned out to be another head scratching moment (Don't most of these challenges lead to more challenges most of the time? :-) ) But still, never say die! So many suggestions and solutions out there, but none of them were working for me because all of them required me to install software on the PC (some of which are paid for, mmmh....I'm an open-source guy) and also on the phone. Herein lay my problem; the Alcatel T-Pop (One Touch 4010X) phone I have, has so little internal memory and unfortunately I don't have an external SD memory card (sigh) so I couldn't install any additional software. Connecting the phone directly to the PC (without installing any software on either device) and enabling USB tethering would cause Windows to start looking for drivers for the RNDIS - Remote Network Driver Interface Specification but to no avail. This here resolved this problem. However, seeing that this is a network adapter that is connected to the phone via a USB cable, you expect to get an IP address assigned to it via DHCP. On my machine, it would end up with the default Windows assigned IP address of 169. The phone was clearly not able to assign addresses. I was disappointed, but then being a network geek helps at times and I figured assigning the correct IPs manually to the adapter would do. But which IPs do I assign? It turns out that the IP range that the phone assigns when tethered is 192.168.42.0/24 with it being the gateway with IP address 192.168.42.129. :-) All I needed was to assign myself an IP from this range and use 192.168.42.129 as my gateway and I had finally sorted the issue out. Also remember to fill in the DNS server fields and don't use 8.8.8.8 because this doesn't seem to work with this, haven't figured out why. I used 41.203.208.18 and 4.2.2.2. Works like a charm! If only 3G could do 425.9 Mbps like the USB Tether network adapter!