Susan Sutherland wrote:

> 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.)

I had the same situation, and wanted to upgrade my modem only.  There is
supposed to be a certain jumper setting that will disable the modem, but allow
the sound card to continue to work, but Windows 95 did not seem to like this at
all.  You may have to call PB (or visit their website) or look in the sc/modem
manual for the settings.  Personally I could never get it to work correctly,
and subsequently had to replace both.  You can get an Encore 56K PCI V.90 modem
for $42 ( http://www.adamant.com ) and a cheap sound card for $15.  It'll save
you a lot of time in configuring the old stuff.  Good luck!

James

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