Eight months ago, a friend asked for some advice on buying a new computer that would play games, let him do his school work and hook up to the Internet. The machine is fine, but there seems to be a problem with the KTX 33,600 internal modem. Before he purchased the machine, he was assured by the vendor that the modem came with Windows 95 drivers. He has only been able to connect at 28,800bit/sec or less. There were no modem driver disks included with the package. After the machine was taken home and set up, Windows 95 detected the modem as a standard 28,800 modem. I queried this with the retailer. Their reply was that Windows 95 comes with its own driver for the modem. I told them that the only drivers found were the standard ones. They suggested contacting Edge (the distributors of the modem). We did this on three occasions asking for drivers with no luck. We again turned to the retailer for help.
Their reply is that they will send the modem back to Edge for checking, and that the standard Windows 95 modem driver will suffice. They claim that the modem will actually run at 33600 -- it's just that Windows 95 doesn't inform you of that. Is this correct? Do the standard drivers have error correction? Any light you can shed on this is very much appreciated. Keep up the good work with the column.
- John Murray
Windows 95 doesn't have a driver for your specific modem. The standard driver will work with your modem, but you will always get better performance if you have a software driver from the manufacturer. As you have found, tracking these drivers down is not always easy. We contacted Edge, who replied very promptly via e-mail, pointing us in the direction of an ftp site with drivers for the KTX 33600. The self-extracting driver file for your modem can be found at ftp://ftp.ktx.com.au/ktx/modem/driverv1-7.exe. You must add the driver yourself from the Modems control panel. When adding the modem, tell Windows 95 not to auto-detect the modem -- you can select your new driver from the list using the Have Disk option to point your system to the directory where you have extracted the downloaded modem driver.
What does Windows 95 do if you don't have a driver for your modem? Users have reported Dial-Up Networking connection speeds of 57,600bit/sec, or even 115,200 bit/sec, even though they only have 33600 bit/sec modems. So what's happening? Windows 95 probably doesn't have any idea of what connect strings your modem is sending back, so instead it just reports the speed between the computer and the modem (the DTE rate), rather than the modem-to-modem speed (DCE rate). So unless you have the driver for your modem, you can't be sure exactly how quickly your modem is communicating. You may even be connecting faster than the reported speed without knowing it.
With the "Standard 28,800bps modem" driver, chances are that Windows 95 is not turning on all the available features, such as data compression and error correction. You cannot control these features on the standard modem driver as you can with the KTX modem driver. See the Advanced tab in the Modem control panel if you want to set these attributes.
- Tony Locke
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Category: Hardware, Win95
Issue: Aug 1997
Pages: 156-157
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Modem drivers