On Mon, Mar 04, 2002 at 05:39:38PM +0000, David Brownlee wrote:
> 	I ordered a 'hardware' internal modem, and received a PCI card
> 	"Conexant Systems HW 56K Fax Modem". It comes with drivers for
> 	win9x and 3.1 which is vaguely hopeful.

Send it back! It is not what you ordered nor of any use to you.
(I have one of these in my 'spare parts' box...  FWIW it even
locked up win98 every time the phone rang!)

> 	Is this likely to be a 'puc' device, something else useful, or
> 	a winmodem by any other name?

After a lot of soul (web) searching I discovered that there are 3
types of modems - Depending on which parts are on themodem card:
   1) Data pump - always on card
   2) DSP - typical winmodem, uses main CPU for DSP, needs an MMX cpu
   3) Controller, a simple 8bit micro is good enough.
No PCI cards have the controller on the card (ok none of the
usual cards), neither do cardbus ones, nor most USB ones.

Most PCMCIA and ISA cards and all (maybe almost all) serially
connected external ones contain the controller.

Unfortunately some manufacturers call 'controllerless' or 'host
controlled' modems 'hardware modems' - which they are not.
They require the manufacturers windows device driver in order
to function.

Beware also that there is linux support for some winmodems,
usually for a particular version of linux you wouldn't be
running.

The external hardware modem I bought actually maintains a
higher connection speed than the PCI card.  It was also
the cheapest one I could find!


	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk