Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!mips!pacbell.com!ucsd!sdcc6!sdcc6.ucsd.edu!cg108dbd From: cg108dbd@icogsci1.ucsd.edu (Steve -Social Hacker) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.modems Subject: Re: CompuCom 9600 Modem Review Message-ID: Date: 11 May 91 07:25:21 GMT References: <19241@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> Sender: news@sdcc6.ucsd.edu Followup-To: comp.dcom.modems Organization: /home/cg108d/cg108dbd/.organization Lines: 81 In-reply-to: cg108dbd@icogsci1's message of 10 May 91 10:35:48 GMT Originator: cg108dbd@icogsci1 Well, I called CompuCom today to get some help with the modem I reviewed. Here's the scoop: First of, CompuCom gets an A+ from me for service.. They actually had a knowlegeable person there to help me out. For me, this is a first. There was no voice menu to wade through, no neverending rings... just "Hello. CompuCom, how can I help you?" I gave them my name and number, and we went to town fixing problems. First, the most annoying problem.. the modem totally hoses my Mars800 scanner. Well, they were as mystified as I and suspected an IRQ conflict. Because I had absolutely no tech info on the scanner, they could do little more than recommend that I call Marstek and get more info on it. #2: The very-volatile ram configuration. This was a real bummer.. get this.. the modem has NO Non-Volatile RAM!! None at all! Yes it has at&w at&w0 at&w1 at&z and so on to "store" configurations, but they all get wiped on reset or power-down. Not good.. this means I have to make sure that every comm program fully sets up the modem, which is not really a big deal. Fortunately, it does not default to auto-answer. :) Ok.. the fax-printing problem. This is where I was impressed. The lady I was talking to was stumped, but said, "Hold on" and handed the phone to another gentleman (Mark?) who really knew his stuff. What blew me away is that he didn't give me the regular stupid-user listing with "Are you sure the modem is installed? Do you have 500K of TSR's loaded? Is the computer turned on?" Anyway, he to was stumped, but was determined to fix it. He worked with me on-line while I reconfigured and tested things. In the end, he said to call John at MagicSoft (the software manufacturer) and gave me the main phone number which was not in the MTEZ manual. To make a long story longer, John WROTE the EZFax software, and was very interested in finding out what was wrong. The fix turned out to be, Move it to the root directory! Although the manual tells you how to set up MTEZ in any subdir, there is a nasty bug in it that will crash VGA machines if EZFax is not in C:\MTEZ. Bingo.. I can now print faxes, and John is busy debugging.. Apparently, the problem is rare, but I was the third person to run into it. Now I can talk about the fax printouts! Excellent. This, of course, is a feature of the software, and nothing to do with the CompuCom, but I figure that most fellow-shoppers are curious to know about the Whole package. Anyway, the printouts are very crisp. I received a fax generated by a fax card, and the output was very close to the real text quality of my Panasonic KXP-1180i in draft mode! I was expecting more lossage. Of course, your mileage may vary, but I would guess that a laser printer would yeild some pretty astounding results. Apparently, I was the first to bring the speaker-monitor dialout problem to their attention. They (CompuCom) were surprised that it behaved this way, but suspected that it was just one of those conflicting-standards problems.. (For those of you who missed the post describing the problem, the modem will silence the speaker immediately after dialing when the ';' is appended to the dial command. MTEZ does not know this, so you can't hear the modem connect.) That was about it for my problems. I also learned a little bit more about the forth-coming VoiceMail support. The card is equipted with full DMA ability, although the modem and fax do not use it. The VoiceMail data will supposedly be able to go from modem directly to hard disk.. Nice! They are still working on the ROMs but expect to have them out by fall of this year. That's about it! Unfortunately, for the reasons I mentioned before, I will probably still be sending this modem back and investing in an HST (with non-volatile ram, I hope!) Any comments, questions, ideas, HST tips, very welcome at the below address. -- >> Steve Haehnichen << shaehnichen@ucsd.edu Disclaimer: UCSD and I do not share any opinions.