I've got a PIII latitude laptop with a Megahertz pcmcia modem in it.
It came with Win 98 on it & I left it there to work this old scanner I have that I can't seem to get going in linux. I split the HDD & installed Puppy & Grub to dual boot them.
So I boot into windoze 98 the other day to do some scanning & thought I'd check out the forums while I was there. The modem blinks it's lights for a second or two, makes some grumbling sounds, then pukes. I tried a bunch of times, pulling the modem & putting it back & so on, autodetection works, control panel/modems/more info, says it's good, but no way, no dialup.
So I figure this modem must be broken.
I decide that's enough playing in doze anyway, so I reboot into puppy to do some other work. While I'm in there, I get busy & forget all about the modem issue & try to dial-up again and while it's dialing up, I remember that the modem is broken...but it's not broken anymore.
I connect fine, dis-connect & re-connect a few times without a glitch.
Then I reboot into windoze again, and try again & again, but it still won't work.
The moral of this story it seems is...
I have always wondered what they meant when they said "smart modem", now I know. It's a modem that checks to see if Linux is installed on the hard disk and if it is, it refuses to connect to the internet under windoze. I wish I'd known about these before...
