On 16 May 2004 05:36:53 GMT, (LASERandDVDfan)
put finger to keyboard and composed:

No software can beat a hardware system. Especially not a winmodem.

No argument here. This understanding was the primary reason why I replaced my
Best Data Mach2 with a U.S. Robotics PerformancePro a few months ago when I was
able to.

Controllerless modems (eg USR and Lucent/Agere "winmodems") have
little impact on the host CPU. IMHO, their only significant down side
is that they require drivers which makes them OS specific. "Soft"
modems, though, are another story ...

Although the overhead gains were mainly negligible since I'm running a 2.08 GHz
Athlon XP with 1 gig of RAM onboard, I don't get blue screen warnings anymore
when I surf the net. The drivers for my old Best Data were probably badly
written.

And as for hardware modems, I'd recommend only 3Com/U.S. Robotics, which
generally use Texas Instruments solutions, or modems with an Agere (formerly
known as Lucent) solution. - Reinhart

I have always found ACF/ACF2 chipped Rockwell/Conexant "hard" modems
to be reliable perfomers.


- Franc Zabkar
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