7 Aug
2008
7 Aug
'08
9:24 p.m.
On Friday 08 August 2008 00:06, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 7 Aug 2008 at 22:09, Roy J. Tellason wrote:
No, I finally remembered the name -- it's a "Maxtech" (or maybe Max-Tech).
I also have this other one, the name not coming
to mind offhand, but it
was in a smaller case and seemed to run somewhat warmer. New out of the
box, it worked well for me at 56K until getting glitched one day and
then when I tried "AT" anything what it comes back with is "boot:"
and
nothing else. I've not been able to find anything about it online, so
far...
This was a USR? Not a Sportster? The Courier V.Everything and Dual
Standards are smaller than the HST, but I assume that isn't what
you're talking about. There was also a lot of junk out there--and I'm
not talking about those
worthless "Winmodems", although those are in a class of garbage all their
own.
Yup. I did pretty well with that, got some decent connect rates, until it
got zapped.
I made the mistake of buying a Hayes Optima 288 V.FC
"business
modem", I did upgrade the firmware to V.34, but the thing was flakey
as hell. I also had a Zoom 56Kx modem, which delivered miserable
performance. USR Sportsters seemed to work all right for awhile and
then exhibit problems.
Zoom put a bad taste in my mouth in a couple of ways. First the manual that
came with the modem didn't include the complete set of commands at all and
most particularly didn't include anything at all about using it for fax
purposes, even though it was supposedly capable of that. Then I called
their bbs, which I was of the initial (mistaken) impression was supposed to
be there to support their products. If I hadn't stumbled across some
messaging to some other caller in a public area I wouldn't have known that
there was a ROM upgrade available for the unit I had, or another manual.
Eventually I got them to send me those, but spent over an hour poking around
there (long distance) looking for tech support. Then when that relay went
bad on me later on and I sent it off for warranty repair they send it back in
a different box, that was a plain white box rather than the one I'd started
with. The original box was the only place that it said anything about the
7-year warranty, there was nothing in the paperwork about it. Thankfully I
moved on to USR not too long after that.
But the Couriers just kept on working until I closed
down the BBS
(still have the hard disk with NT 4.0 and Auntie on it--it might be
fun to boot it to see what the message log has in it).
Indeed they did, mostly. I had one of those get zapped, too.
I shut down my bbs and the next time I tried to fire up that machine that
first HD wasn't working all that well, and didn't want to boot at all.
Good thing I had a whole bunch of smaller drives in there instead of
everything on one big one, but there's still some stuff on there I'd like to
get at one of these days.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin