internal modem 3121

Tony Lawrence

Eh? I paid $80 for my Creative Labs Modem Blaster V.92 Serial. I wanted a modem that did all its processing interally, as opposed to offloaded onto my poor, overworked Duron 750.

Depends on the individual, but sure.

clear

Again, what? I answered the support line for a BBS-ISP that had about 30 external modems organized on a shelf (Thank you, GalactiCards). They tended to be more reliable on poor client connections than our terminal server.

Whenever a modem crashed, we tried power cycling it, but that rarely fixed it. Instead, the solution was to simply remove the modem from the bank. By the late 90s, we stopped having modem failures; the ones that were left just wouldn't die.

have else.

That lightning will happily travel up the serial or USB line. I know of a case where lightning hit some exposed phone wires, went through an ISDN router, over the ethernet cable, through a hub, back over an ethernet cable, through a computer, and zapped the user from the keyboard.

to

People rarely need to diagnose these days. But it *is* fun watching the little blinky lights.

either

Haven't needed that for testing yet. If you're running Linux, it's probably safer to share it with your Doze boxen through the network.

Only if you haven't upgraded your computer before with any frequency. Swapping a PCI card isn't hard at all if you've done it once or twice. If you regularly dig around inside your computer, it becomes child's play.

Dunno anything about that. I've never tried to sell old equipment.

Now, *I* chose to go with an external modem because I wanted something I could be sure wasn't a winmodem. I went with the ModemBlaster Serial because it supported two different levels of functionality...V.90 without special drivers, V.92 with them.

That told me that it was the best chance I had of finding a modem that supported the Hayes command set. I didn't go with a USB modem because I wasn't sure whether they'd show up as USB serial devices or something else.