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The best overall solution is still the old fashioned external modem. More expensive than the internal counterparts, these external modems have their own logic chips and can act as a true gateway to the outside while feeding the information to the computer via one of the serial ports. The important factor here is that the modem itself operates independent of the PC, it won’t take up resources like IRQ and base memory addresses and. Most importantly, it won’t need the power of the CPU to convert the phone signals into digital data for the PC.

The original internal modems used to be a simple variety of the external modems with a modification in the bus interface from the serial bus to the ISA bus. This means that these modems had all the hardware integrated, necessary for decoding the phone signals and feeding them to the ISA interface (the long black expansion slots on the mainboard). The same technology is still available today, called a Hardware Modem. A variety of the ISA Hardware Modem is the PCI Hardware Modem with the only difference that the interface is changed from an ISA slot to a PCI slot (white expansion slots). These modems are marginally less expensive than the external modems, however, like those, they offer their own logic and operate independent of the CPU power. Personally, my preference is an ISA hardware modem since those are the most stable and fastest modems available (but hard to come by).

Modem for Windows (Winmodem, software modem)

The three terms listed in the header above are synonymous, they specify exactly the same thing. A Winmodem is a modem that is actually just a connector with a little transformer to power the dialer and the on-board speaker to beep and relate error messages. The real work of the modem is actually done in software, that is, a program running within Windows is used to redirect all work towards the CPU. CPUs nowadays are extremely powerful and spend most of their cycles idling, so this seems like a good idea. In reality, the translation of modem signals in software emulation is a very inefficient way to get the information to the system. The mere fact that upon dialing into the ISP, even the most powerful PC drops everything and comes to a virtual standstill shows how much power is consumed by this kind of software emulation. It does get even worse. Ever had wet phone lines or a bad connection? If the signals received by a Winmodem are not clean, it often happens that the PC goes into a loop, trying to receive what is not there and, after a brief period of time, crashes. If you have a Winmodem and your PC develops arthritis everytime the weather gets bad or the web is really busy, this may be the reason for the stability problems you are having. Needless to say that this scenario adds substantial wear to the rest of your hardware.

Another thing implicit from the name Winmodem is the fact that these modems only work in Windows. Anyone planning to even play around with an alternative operating system like Linux should be advised that any Winmodem is completely useless in this case.

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