Topic: Modem troubles

[idolminds]

Im having trouble on my new system and I dont know whats going on.

It started a week or two ago. I woke up and there was a thunderstorm, so I rush over to shut down the PC. No problems, it shuts down and I unplug it and the modem just in case of a lightning strike. Ive done this before, didnt think anything of it.

Reboot everything is fine, except now my modem wouldnt connect. Retried a couple times and eventually it would go, but no idea what difference or change happened that would make it work or not.

Well, this keeps happening and tonight I get disconnected and have trouble again. Ive tried unintalling and reinstalling the modem but no luck. I even go and pull my old modem from my old system and install it, but it shares the problem...odd, since I know it worked in the old system.

I had installed Windows Update Agent just before this all happened and thought that might have done it, so I did a system restore to before then but the problem remained. Tonight I got fed up, backed up my files and did a full reinstall of windows.

Guess what, didnt help. And I just ave up trying to connect, so Im borrowing my dads laptop.

So heres what happens: The modem gets a dial tone and dials. It makes all the "im making a connection" noise (well, one modem does. The other one makes some different sounds but that might be just because its a different make). The original modem just kind of dies and times out. My old modem/now new modem gets to the Verify user name and password" and says it was dropped from the other end.

Its a hard thing to troubleshoot since so few people still use dialup. Any help would be appreciated.

[Ghandi]

Have you contacted your ISP to see if it's a problem on their end?

[scottws]

Troubleshooting dial-up is a huge bitch and it's something I do every day.  Usually it all comes down to line quality.  You've done everything you can on the PC end.  Clearly that isn't the issue, unless somehow both modems have hardware trouble, which honestly isn't all that uncommon.

The only thing you can really do at this point is replace the telephone wire and contact the ISP or try a different dial-up number.  If that doesn't work, you're probably looking at an internal line problem.

[idolminds]

When I get home I'll pull my system over to the other line and see if it changes anything. I did bring my dads laptop into this room and use the line, and it worked there. So I'm thinking something internal (to my pc) now.

[scottws]

Ever get this narrowed down a bit more?

[idolminds]

No, I'm currently out of town. I'll have to mess with it when I get back home in another week or so.

[idolminds]

Well, its not the phone line. Later today I guess Ill try installing the modems into another system and see if they work there.

I got some other weird errors last night trying. Stuff like "Another component of the system isnt working" or something like that. I checked the hardware manager and it looked like I didnt have PCI drivers installed. Fixed that up, but the modems still screw up.

[scottws]

Gotta love dialup.  I recently got my grandfather's old WIndows 98 PC going again and he's on dialup.  Trouble is, it can't maintain a connection for longer than like 5 minutes.  It's awesome.

[idolminds]

Yes, it is a joy.

Heres a new wrinkle. LAst night I tried to connect a whole bunch of times. Many failures. A couple times it seemed to work, but was then disconnected almost immediately. I checked my usage records from the ISP and it looks like I did indeed connect a couple times (about 5) and was connected for less than 10 seconds each one.

Arg, this is driving me nuts. Nothing makes sense. It dials and from everything I see it should be working. None of the error messages are useful, and everything Ive tried hasnt helped anything.

I uninstalled both modems, removed the original "faulty" one and then connected with the secondary older modem once it reinstalled, same issue (was thinking some conflict or something might be messing with the other modem.). So, my PC is open, both modems pulled out. Going to go ahead and pop the known good one in my old PC and see if it still works. If it does, I'll probably go kill myself.

[idolminds]

Oh awesome. I put my old modem back in my old PC to see if it still works. The system locked once booted into windows, and now fails to load windows entirely. So I cant even test it. Huzzah.

I saw a USB hardware modem on sale at walmart in north dakota. maybe I should try something like that.

[idolminds]

I've settled on this modem. Going to order today and should have it by the end of the week. As a plus, it works under linux.

[scottws]

Well, good luck and all, I guess.  I don't know what it is about modems, but they are such pieces of shit.  We replace them all the time at work simply because stores set them on top of the battery backup.  Something with the EM field fucks them up.

[idolminds]

Well, it works. I is happy.