There's a Wire on My Modem

[Nooyawkah]

I took my US Robotics 56K Sportster Voice/Fax (whatever) modem out of my Dell and want to install it in my new (soon to be built, I hope) system. There is a skinny power wire attached to it that attaches to the motherboard. It's frayed and messed up. I guess I should replace it. What do you call it? Where does it attach on the motherboard? Do I need it? And how come the cheap $10 modem I bought on eBay to put into the old Dell says it connects at 115,000 (doesn't seem possible) and the US Robotics connects at 48,000? Also, the cheap modem doesn't have one of those wires. It works fine. Any suggestions/help greatly appreciated.

One other thing, has anyone used a dual internal audio cable to be able to play music out of BOTH the CD/DVD and CD-RW? Are they a good idea?

[Rick]

The small wire off the Modem is most likely a cable for the sound card / mic.
Giving it Voice capability.
If you don’t use Voice with the Modem then you don’t need the wire.

What you are seeing when the $10 modem displays a connect speed of 115000 is the DTE speed Not the true connect speed. Dte speed is the speed the modem is communicating with the Mother board.
You can change the displayed speed by checking the Doc’s for the correct Modem ini to tell it to display connect speed.
If you contact the modem maker or check the disk that came with the modem you should find the info there.

Running One cable from two players to the sound card is going to open your self up to all the variables of poor shielding and signal lose or corruption
Static from one drive may filter into the other while playing sound from one drive and using data from the other.
I have found it just as easy to connect only 1 cable to the cd-dvd and leave the cd-rw for data Only. Not good reason to subject a cd-rw to ware and tare playing music when the cd-dvd was designed for it.

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To ERR is HUMAN
To REALLY screw things UP, YOU NEED a COMPUTER !