Winmodems aren´t THAT bad!

[Nuno]

Sick and tired of my 33.6 lousy dl speeds I bought a dirty (and I mean it) cheap generic modem. It has a Rockwell HCF 56k chip on it, and it´s so generic than I couldn´t even find the manufacturer neither in the box or in the manual The damn modem even has a label "made in vietnam". I didn´t even know they make hardware there!

I gave it a try, installed it, even managed to get some other manufacturer (zoltrix I guess) HCF drivers more up-to-date.

It connects at 44000 bps (I was amazed, considering the poor quality phone lines we got here), downloads at 4-5 K/s, and I even got very decent ping times in online gaming (150-200 for portuguese servers, 200-300 for others).

So, amazingly enough, it´ll be replacing my ISA hardmodem...

[Jammrock]

Winmodems are okay. I use them in computers that are not going to be gaming machines. Winmodems take up quite a bit of your CPU's clock time, as most of the modem functions are done by the CPU. And even if you have a high speed PIII system, a Winmodem is going to drop your overall system performance in intense online gaming. For normal web stuff they are great.

ISA hardware 56k modems on the other hand, take up very little CPU time and are just as fast (some would argue faster) than winmodems. Plus Hardware modems can be used in non-Microsoft OS's, such as Linux, BeOS and Windows NT (most Winmodems don't work in NT 4.0). My friend uses a winmodem on everquest and gets lost packets and high ping rates all the time. I use a hardware modem on everquest and get good ping rate (for a plain old modem) and rarely get packet lose. Not exactly a scientific study here, but you get the general idea. Just my $0.02.

Jammrock

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PIII 540, 256 MB SDRAM, ASUS P3B-F, Winblows 98 SuckyEdition, 18 GB HDD, 6x DVD w/ decoder, (TEMPORARY!!!) Voodoo 3 2000 which will be replaced by a Matrox G400, SB Live!

[Nuno]

Yes, I realized all that and I was ready for the worse, but it has been a nice surprise. I have a celeron 450/G400-32Mb@150, and a can´t tell a diference in on-line gaming from my old isa 33.6. If any, for the better.
And it has drivers for NT4.0. Linux, of couse, is a different story, but I have mixed feelings about linux and don´t use it no more.