Re: 56K Modems
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On Sat, Jan 03, 2004 at 04:32:42PM +0100, Dr.-Ing. C. Hurschler wrote:
> I know you guys are talking about external modems, and I'd aggree that they're
> probably easier to get running than an internal modem, but I bought a Smart
> Link 56K Modem (Internal) over ebay for a couple of euros and got it running
> under Woody as a relative newbie. I had to compile the module for it, but
> the instructions were fairly easy to follow, and if it had really been hard
> I'm sure I wouldn't have gotten it to work.
>
> The modem worked fine.
Well, having worked tech support before, and having been on the list
for a while, it's often best to just give the easiest answer first.
Yes, you can get many internal modems to work. But we probably don't
know what is involved in getting your ACME SuprSurfr SpeedWhiz 56k
Whatever going, if it's even possible to.
You lucked out. You have a *real* modem instead of a bass-ackwards
sound card pretending to be a modem, in which it configures pretty
much like any other Serial I/O expansion board, you just get the added
bonus of not having an additional bonus of not having to plug in a
wall-wart and add another cable to the tangled mess behind your desk.
The tradeoff is now your phone line has a pretty good chance of
passing a line surge directly to your motherboard. Your power supply
isn't going to stop that puppy, since it won't be going through the
power supply. With an external modem, most modems of good quality
(USRobotics, Hayes) will sacrifice themselves if a line surge hits,
without passing it to your computer. Having to replace a motherboard
and all the CPUs, cards and drives that were plugged into it is a lot
more expensive than replacing a modem.
You also don't get lights to tell you what's going on with the modem.
Those lights really, really help if something is going wrong with it.
I find it a tremendous pain in the butt in having to deal with
software to get status of something better displayed conventionally.
And to quote rick, "But that's my opinion, I could be wrong."
- --
.''`. Paul Johnson <baloo@ursine.ca>
: :' :
`. `'` proud Debian admin and user
`- Debian - when you have better things to do than fix a system
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