modem blues

[LeeV]

Hello again everyone,

In effort to upgrade my old clunker, I'm trying to decide which modem I should use. I origianaly had a USR Sporster 28800, and while I had no problems with this modem, the need for speed took over. I had two modems laying around so I thought I would give them a try.

Here comes trouble... The first modem I tried to install was a USR Courier V Everything modem. Instalation went great and I reset all my ISP's but when it goes to dial out I get an error message that says: Port diconected due to hardware failure. This modem worked in the donor machine (at least thats what I've been told http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/eek.gif )and windows selected the driver itself as the best one for it. It selected com 2 as its port and there was no conflicts with IRQ's. How can I determine if this modem is a paperweight?

The second modem I had was a LT WIN Modem 56K and while I beleive these can be trouble, instalation and operation seem to be okay. I am currently "connected" at 33600, which is quite a bit more peppy than the 24000-26400 connects that I experienced with the sportster.

Should I stay with the win modem since it seems to be working satisfactory, or should I keep trying with the Courier?

My System:
Microstar 5116 mboard
P133 w/1MB L2 cache
256MB EDO ram
ATI Mach 64+ onboard video 2MB
Sound Blaster 16 Pnp with ide for cd

[Paleo Pete]

"If it works, don't fix it" is a fairly reliable rule to follow. Since it is after all a winmodem, it might not be the best, and with a 133MHz CPU it might use up resources you can't afford to give up.

If you don't have another machine available to try the other modem on, and tinker with, I would leave well enough alone and use the one that's working. At least until you can afford a real hardware modem...

See how it goes, if it doesn't slow your system down too much, and the connections don't drop to nothing when you try to download, it might be acceptable for a while, but winmodems have a reputation for slow connection speeds, slow down during downloads and won't speed back up, drop connections quite often, and use your CPU instead of one on the card to do the job a hardware based modem does by itself.

If you start to notice bad overall performance while on the internet, get disconnected a lot, or connection speeds don't remain fairly acceptible, go back to the 28,800.

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