I thought you all might find this story amusing: I bought an external
Zoom modem long ago at a flea market for about $5. It was a 56K ``dualmodem''
made just about the time the fight was one between V90 and Flex for the
56K standard.
It languished in my closet for years as I tried to find the right
25pin to 9pin converter cable, to install the upgraded software to its
flash rom. Meanwhile all the serial ports on the back of PCs had gone
9 pin. I would get some converter that seemed right only to find that
the posts on the 2 recepticles were both female and bumped into each other,
although the pins and hole male/female parts were OK, etc.
Finally, the day arrived when I found some old cables I did not know I
had that would plug in right. Alas, I had a REAL hardware 56K modem,
instead of my beloved internal ISA US Robotics one that worked great but
was only 33K.
Surprise my model 2949L was not a win modem, a software modem, a PCI
modem. But the flash ugrade Zoom offerred would only work on Windows
9X or above!!!! not even Linux -- had to have winblows or no upgrade.
I finally did the upgrade on a PC at work, only to find epppd apparently
failing me. Another tip for some on this: The culprit turned out to be
the Zoom modem connect time, negotiating with my ISP -- up to a minute
it would take, where my US Robotics could connect in half that or less.
Once I reset all my modem software to a time out of forever, or at least
a minute, I had a working hardware 56K modem -- Whew !!
In this regard I recently did replace trusty epppd with the smaller,
LSPPP. However, since LSPPP requires all options on the command like,
it seems to easily exceed the dos command line character limit no?
I find it more practical, to use the old chat0.exe scripting dialer, with
a lot more alternatives and no command line limit, and then just l oad
LSPPP after I connect with an external dialer.
I still find LSPPP a little more finicky than epppd -- Seems many times if
some internet application crashes or some such, my whole machine freezes
and I must do a hard reboot. This did not used to happen with epppd.
----------------------------------------
Howard Schwartz
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howardbschwartz "at" california.com
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