Best Data modem crashes

My father in law (a novice) has a Best Data 56K modem installed in his Windows 98 machine. It has worked well for years but recently failed to connect. When I checked Device Manager, it indicated a failure caused by a memory conflict. This machine has virtually no peripherals and very few programs and certainly nothing new in the last year, so I thought a removal and reinstall might do the job. It worked great. Everything was fine. I shut down, rebooted, got online and offline numerous times etc just to make sure everything was OK. The machine worked flawlessly. That night after I left (of course), the machine failed to connect again. The symptoms are exactly the same as before, and I am sure the Device Manager is going to show the same causes (I have to drive there to be sure). I'm thinking of installing a new modem. Does this make sense? BTW, is there any difference between a cheap Best Data modem and a US Robotics with the same description other than price?

 

Yes, is does make sense.
If there is a big price difference, I would say one modem has a controller, the other is controllerless [winmodem].
The difference between these is the controllerless uses your computer to do some of it's work, via installed files. This can slow the computer down.
One way to tell by looking at the box is look at the minimum system requirements. If is says it needs a minimum of 166MHZ processor, it probably is controllerless.
If it says a minimum of a 486 [66MHZ or less], it has it's own controller.
I would get an external modem, it would have it's own controller for sure. This would connect to your serial port [COM1}

 

When you say "memory ", do you mean "resource "?

Try this:
Uninstall the way you did before. Shutdown and move the modem to another PCI slot, the last slot is best (near the edge of the motherboard).

Changing the position of the modem should make Windows allocate different resources for it.

Matt

 

Problem solved! What I thought was a modem problem wasn't! It turned out the system BIOS battery was dead so whenever it was shut down, it lost all the BIOS settings. Unfortuately, the first time I worked on the machine I failed to notice that the clock was wrong. The second time I wasn't so careless. Replacing the battery solved all the problems!

 

Well, that idea wasn't on my mind.
Glad to read you have found the problem, and thank you for posting back.