External (usb) dial-up modem problems - help needed

woj101

Visited my father-in-law this weekend who's recently split from OH and whilst the OH got the family computer he had to settle for a redundant office computer.

He wants broadband and asked me to sort it out for him so I tried getting on the net only to find it had no dial-up modem installed, just network cards and ISDN (which I have no experience of and without web access was unable to research). Against my advice he then went out and bought a usb dial-up so that we could get online and proceed with registering for broadband.

However, running Win2000 and using a 'Zoom' usb modem we couldn't get it to do anything. Installed the drivers and ran the internet connection wizard only for it to fail to connect to the referral service. What's more is I didn't hear any noise coming from the modem (none of the usual dialling I'd expect from an internal dial-up modem). Checking the diagnostics the modem responded fine but repeatedly failed any sort of dialling.

Checking the hardware properties I noticed there was some sort of problem with a network card so I uninstalled it, thinking it might be conflicting in some way, but this made no difference and now each time the computer boots up it tries reinstalling this network card but can't find the drivers.

I therefore feel quite guilty cos I've just added to his problems, so if anyone can suggest what is wrong with his system I would be very grateful.

Cheers all.

Quincy_3

Who is the telephone line provider? And has Caller Indentification been turned off?

woj101

Not actually sure, I would presume BT because he won't have bothered looking elsewhere yet.

Quincy_3

woj101 wrote:

Not actually sure, I would presume BT because he won't have bothered looking elsewhere yet.

I ask that as some ISPs wont allow you to join if you dont have a BT line, has caller identification been turned off, so that if father in law makes a phonecall and someone does a 1471 to get his number and they get nowt that may be a problem, and who was the ISP you tried joining?

woj101

Not sure about caller id stuff but I can find this out tonight. As for which ISP, we didn't get that far, it wouldn't dial the referral service number that automatically pops up when you try and set it up.

espresso

woj101 wrote:

Not sure about caller id stuff but I can find this out tonight. As for which ISP, we didn't get that far, it wouldn't dial the referral service number that automatically pops up when you try and set it up.

Don't know what you mean by the 'referral service' but as you seem to have installed the modem drivers and the modem diagnostics report that all is OK, try to create a new DUN by following the Windows 2000 instructions on this webpage.

There is also a Dial-up Help and Support link on that website, near the top.

:hello: