On 13 Apr 2002, at 8:46, Gary Zimmerman wrote:

> Recently a friend had to reformat hdd on an older 486 so we
> installed W98SE which went fine except now at startup she gets a
> 2F8H address conflict and now the system can't seem to find the
> modem any more. Anyone know what this conflict is and how to
> resolve it? Does it have something to do with the modem or com
> port conflict? Also as an aside now the mouse pointer has this big
> black box around it which is rather annoying and we can't seem to
> get rid of that either. Thanks for any suggestions.
> Gary

  2F8 is the standard device address for COM2.

  Usually, an internal modem installs as an additional COMn port.
For historical reasons, this is usually COM2, and so if the
motherboard or some other peripheral card provides a second COM port,
this needs to be either disabled or configured as COM3.
  Presumably, this was done when the modem was originally installed,
but at some point in the "reformat" this setting reverted to its
default COM2, conflicting with the modem.

  (On motherboards with two serial ports, this is controlled from the
BIOS (CMOS) setup screen, and there's no need to change it in order
to format a hard drive.  This commonly happens when someone has gone
to that screen and selected "Restore Defaults".  Note that this
selection may apply across more of the configuration than just the
currently displayed page....)

David Gillett

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