modem questions

Hello all;
A friend is having a continous problem with his cheapie ( I know, I know) Winmodem. He can dial up and connect...sometimes. Although, "if" he is able to connect he still may not be able to browse the Net' or download his email. I not sure the make or model of this modem however I do know it is the cheapest one you can buy. He runs Win98se with a 1gig Athlon. Nice machine.

I guess the biggest part of the question is..... "IF" you are able to connect to the net, how much of a roll does the modem still play as far as browsing and downloading??? Where does the modem's roll start and where does it end.......especially considering the Winmodem factor.
Should add that all of his DUN settings ect. have been gone through completely by his ISP. All is OK.

Please, lets not get into the Winmodem debate again.

Thanks in advance,

Dale

 

I have seen this a lot with Earthlink and Mindspring--you connect but there is no throughput. In other words, you dial up, get connected; but, there is no data transfer. If yours is an Earthlink or Mindspring connection, chances are it is their server that is the culprit.

Back when Earthlink and Mindspring used IP numbers in the dialer, it was easy to solve this problem. We just got different server numbers and put them in. We connected to a different server and the problem went away--permanently.

As for Winmodems, there are good ones and bad ones. Since the advent of PCI, it is difficult to distinguish between the Winmodems and the so-called "real" ones. Generally, a modem that costs less than $20 cannot be relied on outside a large metropolitan area. In other words, you need to be reasonably close to the telephone switching office to get a good connection. Recently, I found an exception to this rule. I went to Sam's club and found USRobotics Winmodems on closeout. I purchased ten of them for $15 each and have installed 6 so far--no problems yet.