Intermittently working modems

[Ben]

Hello

I have an acer travelmate 541 which is giving me modem problems. It
has an internal modem which stopped working (error says 'modem not
responding, are you sure it is connected/switched on'). I tried
installing drivers, tried deleting it from the system and having win98
detect it again. Sometimes it worked and sometimes win98 didn't even
detect it. Eventually I resorted to a clean install of win98 (there
was a whole lot of junk on that pc - it was a basket of errors)

With my clean install of win98 I still can't get the modem going. Last
night it worked OK. This morning the modem was not responding. It
didn't even appear in the system.

I have a psion goldcard pcmcia modem which I tried using instead. THis
sometimes worked before I did the windows re-install. Now the pcmcia
modem will dial and make contact with my ISP but the sound is very
distorted and the connection doesn't get past the vefirication of
passwords. When I try again the modem does not respond.

I've tried installing new drivers for both modems, and new drivers for
the pcmcia cardbus but I haven't had much success. I don't know why
the internal modem sometimes works and sometimes doesn't (when it does
work the sound is a little 'noisy')and I don't know how to get the
pcmcia modem to work.

Any advice or clues?

TIA
Ben

[BillW50]

Hi Ben... There are gobs of reasons for modems to act like you are
describing. Hopefully you get some sort of error message that would help to
point out the real cause. Like posting the actual error message itself along
with the error code.

Bill