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Why are soft modems so hard?

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Hello all.

Anyone have any experience with soft modems and unreliable dial-up connections?

I just bought 60 Dell Latitudes for my company with built-in soft modems, and people are sometimes having difficulty making dial-up ISP connections. When you use a PC Card hardware modem everything is AOK every time, but with the soft modem, connections take longer, are slower, sometimes don’t go through, and sometimes get dropped. Then again, sometimes they’re OK too.

There does not seem to be any correlation to time of day, number dialed, or any other factor.

I know of friends and family members who have had difficulty on lower-end desktops with soft modems when trying to connect to AOL and the like, so it seems like the problem is somewhat common?

Anyone ever come up against this and figure out a way to fix it?

Regards,

Joe

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Why are soft modems so hard?

In reply to Why are soft modems so hard?

Welcome to the world of winmodems, Joe – The only way I’ve found to fix the problem is to, of course, have the absolute most recent drivers and/or firmware updates, and to try initialization strings until you’re blue in the face. You can generally find beaucoup sites with init strings doing a simple search on the web. It just takes time…
Some things that can speed up your connection are no-brainers, like disabling the log on to network option and turning off IPX/SPX and NetBeui for your dialer (using DUN), but it’s generally just a pain.

Why are soft modems so hard?

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Why are soft modems so hard?

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I’ve worked with IBM’s MWAVE technology, which was a sound card/soft modem. Is this the same type of configuration? If it is, I would check for any confilicts between the sound card and the software attempting to make the dial up connections. Check to see if it’s possible to disable the cards multimedia functions and attempt to dial out. Also, I’ve had problems with certain h.w. modems having trouble establishing a connection with other vendor’s h.w. modems.
Hope this helps. Good luck.

Why are soft modems so hard?

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Why are soft modems so hard?

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Hi Joe I believee you have answered your own question so give our self 100 points 🙂 Using a software modem uses systems resourses and when you are trrrying to use other things such as perrsonal messengers or word processors ( spell checkers) ora ny thng that might run in the back round you over tax your cpu. Using a hardware modem uses only a little of systmes resourses and less shut downs. [email protected]

Why are soft modems so hard?

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Why are soft modems so hard?

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Welcome to the wonderful world of technology.

As with windows 3.1, win 95, win 98, win me, NT 1 thru 5, win 2000?, Soft modems are in their infancy! There are bugs to work out, so all sofware engineers/programmers say. The consumer is the test case for “working out the bugs”. So if you want it to work, Load up the computers with RAM, expand the swap files to the max (or let win try to handle it), and watch for software patches to debug the soft modem.

Why are soft modems so hard?

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Why are soft modems so hard?

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