On 16 May 2004 02:17:14 GMT, (LASERandDVDfan)
put finger to keyboard and composed:

Gateway said, "Too bad your house can't make use of our
superior modem." I said, "Not so fast. Your modem is not superior

The only thing that would make the Gateway integrated modem superior is that
it's connected directly to the southgate on the motherboard through a local bus

.... which would make it an inferior AC97 softmodem.

as opposed to working through a PCI bus, USB port, or a parallel port.

Although "soft" USB and PCI modems do exist, they are most often
controllerless, which makes them better than softmodems. As for
"parallel" port modems, I've heard they exist, but I've never seen
one. Serial port modems are always "hard".

Other than that, I'm willing to bet it's a softmodem with a cruddy chipset,
like a PCTel or a Motorola or an Intel, and running with a sloppy set of
drivers.

The tech turned me over to a
manager who agreed to pay for an external modem. I kept the computer.

I have used the external modem ever since.

Good choice. All external modems are going to be hardware-based, at least for
the parallel port variety.

Don't you mean "serial", not "parallel"?

I did a modem noise check of my phone lines (in my new home) several months
ago.

What did this involve?

It was somewhat high but then things settled down and I wasn't getting
disconnected. Now the problem has returned.

Call the phone company and have them correct the problem. They may perform a
test and say that it's okay, but tell them that this is for a computer modem
and while the line may be suitable for regular conversation, it is apparently
too noisy and, therefore, unacceptable for use with a modem.

Tell them you are having trouble sending/receiving faxes. The telco is
not obliged to provide "computer" grade phone lines, only voice and
fax.

You're paying for their services, so make them deliver you that service in the
best way possible.

What I probably should do to troubleshoot further is graph disconnects per
day
vs. weather trends. Also, maybe I'll try the internal modem.

Query the modem's last call diagnostic report, as described elsewhere
in this thread.

Other things you could try is to use a different telephone cord that is the
shortest possible for your needs.

I wonder about this. Unless the phone cord is of extremely poor
quality, I can't see how adding even 10m to several km of cable is
going to affect a 4kHz connection ... assuming, of course, that you
keep the cable away from sources of electrical interference.


- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 's' from my address when replying by email.