I think that there is a misconception that all WinModem's are softmodems.
There are win modems that use a hardware based datapump and controller. They
are simply jumperless and use windows to assign the IRQ and Com port. A
software type or soft modem, uses software and the computers processing
ability to do part or all of these functions. Your US Robotics may have both
a controller and a data pump on board or it may have a hardware type datapump
but no controller in which case your computer only has to emulate the
controller. To my knowledge, USR never made HSP type modem which has neither
a controller or a data pump.

While I have not tested any modems lately, in the past, I have tested
WinModems against both standard jumpered type modems and software modems. On
slower machines, I was using a P166, the only modems that tested slower were
the software type modems. When I used faster systems, blazingly fast 350Mhz
systems, only the cheaper HSP type modems were any slower and the better
software modems showed no difference as long as you didn't try to run any
other applications at the same time. At 450Mhz, I would guess that you could
probably play game and use your modem and not notice a decline in performance.

While I am still no fan of the software modem, with systems running at 1Ghz
or better, I imagine that most systems would hardly flinch at tacking the
responsibility of any type modem onto them. Unless you have a specific reason
to want to force your system to work around a modem that you set the
resources on, I would find a good quality WinModem (which you probably
already have) .

Dennis Noble


> Any opinions as to whether a 56K hardware modem would be able to deliver
> significantly faster connection speeds than the same brand 56K modem in a
> Win version? I am using a US Robotics 56K Win modem running Win98SE on a
> 100 MHz mother board with an Intel Pentium 450 MHZ CPU

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