cbob
03-12-2002, 11:33 PM
I bought a new Zoom PCI V.92/V.44 modem at Best Buy the other day. It really screamed along on my old noisy phone lines. Connect times were 48-49K every time I connected. Web pages snapped onto the screen. That was excellent, considering that my 4-year-old WinModem had never connected faster than 38K, and often connected at 33K.
The only problem was that, once or twice every couple hours, the Zoom modem randomly blue screened my computer with a VxD error in the LTModem driver. Once, it spontaneously rebooted the entire computer. Downloading the latest drivers from Zoom.com didn't fix the problem. Uninstalling it and reinstalling it multiple times also did nothing to fix the problem. And despite 5 hours of effort, it refused to run on any COM port except COM3, which it shared with the PCI Controller (which might explain the blue screens). So, sadly, I took the screaming fast Zoom modem back to Best Buy for a refund last night and then spent another 4 hours getting my old WinModem to work again (IRQ problems again - I hate PnP - I ended up having to manually set COM1 and COM2 back to their proper IRQs).
I know that U.S. Robotics has a good reputation for modems, so today, I read all of the modem information on the U.S. Robotics Web site, everything on their modem boxes at Best Buy, and even did a search there for the term "V.44" on their Web site. Unfortunately, nowhere in any of that information did I find even one mention of V.44 compression.
I was under the impression that V.44 is one of the "built-in features" of the new V.92 standard. If that's so, then why does every other manufacturer of V.92 modems that I've seen also say that their modems also support V.44, but USR doesn't?
The only problem was that, once or twice every couple hours, the Zoom modem randomly blue screened my computer with a VxD error in the LTModem driver. Once, it spontaneously rebooted the entire computer. Downloading the latest drivers from Zoom.com didn't fix the problem. Uninstalling it and reinstalling it multiple times also did nothing to fix the problem. And despite 5 hours of effort, it refused to run on any COM port except COM3, which it shared with the PCI Controller (which might explain the blue screens). So, sadly, I took the screaming fast Zoom modem back to Best Buy for a refund last night and then spent another 4 hours getting my old WinModem to work again (IRQ problems again - I hate PnP - I ended up having to manually set COM1 and COM2 back to their proper IRQs).
I know that U.S. Robotics has a good reputation for modems, so today, I read all of the modem information on the U.S. Robotics Web site, everything on their modem boxes at Best Buy, and even did a search there for the term "V.44" on their Web site. Unfortunately, nowhere in any of that information did I find even one mention of V.44 compression.
I was under the impression that V.44 is one of the "built-in features" of the new V.92 standard. If that's so, then why does every other manufacturer of V.92 modems that I've seen also say that their modems also support V.44, but USR doesn't?