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| Author |
Message |
| 6 new of 205 responses total. |
keesan
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response 200 of 205:
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Jun 19 02:06 UTC 2002 |
Jim found three more 'cases' on the porch today. We recycled them all and
found: controller card without ports, printer port without controller,
some usable floppy drives, two huge hard drives (one was 'full height and
weighs the same as a laptop computer), a three-piece 386-486 upgrade card,
a sound card with audio cable (we have few of these), two MDA or MGA cards,
a 540 M hard drive, and not a mouse but a very large and very stinky mouse
nest. We put it out. There are also a lot of bugs (moths) flying around now.
Do the newer sound cards (3D) do wave-table synthesis? Only one of my 16-bit
cards did this and midi files sound a lot better.
The mystery card with a socket is for putting Socket 370 pentium cpus into
Slot-1 boards - can anyone explain what these boards look like? All our
pentium cpus but the oldest are Socket 7. The P75 is socket 5. I forget what
486s have.
We had one board with EISA slots that take ordinary ISA cards or EISA - there
are two levels and you can use either one. It was in a dead computer.
One computer took a keyboard with a phone-jack end so we did not test it.
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gull
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response 201 of 205:
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Jun 19 12:34 UTC 2002 |
Re #199: The 56K modem connecting at 31,200 bps is probably a phone line
quality thing. They fall back to a speed they can reliably communicate at.
It's rare to see one connect at faster than 49,000 bps, and the maximum is
actually 54,000 bps. Also, they'll only connect at those speeds to an ISP
with special equipment -- if you connect two consumer 56K modems to each
other the maximum speed is 33,600 bps.
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keesan
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response 202 of 205:
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Jun 19 13:45 UTC 2002 |
So does Ann Arbor have any phone lines that will work at 56K? Why do people
keep paying extra to upgrade to that from 33K? What is the difference between
consumer and ISP modems such that one works to the rated speed with another
modem and the other does not? I am surprised that these modems were not
designed to at least work at something in between 31200 and 56K - or is that
not possible? Do the 56K modems at least have better compression rates? (Not
that it matters as I disabled compression with S15=128 which is supposed to
fix some bug in compression, or are there different kinds of compression?).
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keesan
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response 203 of 205:
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Jun 19 13:47 UTC 2002 |
We have our computer plugged in via a fax-phone switch and lots of other cable
before it hits the box outdoors. Would a more direct connection make it go
faster?
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gull
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response 204 of 205:
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Jun 19 14:18 UTC 2002 |
Re #202: No phone lines anywhere in the U.S. will work at 56K. 56,000 bps
is a theoretical max. For various reasons, mostly (I'm told) related to FCC
rules, 54K is the most you'll ever see on actual phone lines. Personally,
my experience is that if you have good lines you can often get 49K but
usually nothing higher. Also, it's asymmetric -- you're *receiving* at that
speed, but the maximum *sending* (upload) speed is always 33.6K.
The difference is the modems at the ISP end are directly connected to a
digital connection from the phone company. When you make a normal call,
the analog audio signals are converted to digital ones at some point along
the line (usually at the central office), routed around the phone network,
then converted to analog again at the other end. Eliminating one of those
conversions makes the higher speeds possible.
Re #203: Possibly.
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tpryan
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response 205 of 205:
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Jun 20 01:42 UTC 2002 |
The best I seen on my earthlink connection is 44K. I usually
get a 38.6K connection.
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