My customer has a Packard Bell 75 mhz early-Pentium type machine. It has
one of (what I understand is PB's) standard modem/sound card combination
devices. Today I upgraded their memory, and they wanted to know about
upgrading their modem too. The question is, I believe it would be fairly
costly to replace the proprietary modem/sound device, so I wondered, would
it be okay to just add a second modem in a free ISA or PCI slot? They have
two ISA slots free and one PCI slot free. To me, as far as both cost and
quality, this would be the most sensible solution. I'd just leave the
modem/sound card device where it is and not use the modem.

Their current modem is only 14.4. Until today, when I also upgraded them to
Win95...yes, only just to Win95... they could only connect at 2400. I had
tried without success to improve their connect speed with init strings, but
this was while they still had Win 3.1. Windows 95, as I had hoped, has now
got them up to the big 14.4.

So, does anyone know of any issues involved in these PB machines, any
reason why I can't just add another modem and leave the existing device as
it is? Any problems expected installing a PCI modem instead of ISA? (I'd
suggest PCI if I found a reasonably priced one...not el cheapo, just
reasonable.)

details:
Packard Bell 75 mhz,
model number is CAN F447CD (I expect the "Can" is for Canada, where I am.)
now running Win95A (they got it with the machine but never installed it
till now.)
40 MB memory
2 CD-ROM drives,
abovementioned modem and sound card device
no additional peripherals except a HP printer/fax multipurpose machine
running from the printer port. Everything is as it came from the factory so
far as I can tell, except for the memory upgrade.

I have recorded additional details but did not think they are relevant for
this query.

Thanks.
Susan Sutherland

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