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In the Forums... |
Posted: March 12, 2000 Written By: Keith "Farrel" McClellan Introduction This is the first in a series of new Windows 2000 centric tweak guides. I've been using Windows 2000 now since it came out (I played around with some of the betas earlier on as well) and I think I've come up with some pretty neat tweaks for you on the modem front -- as well as some information on working around some of the current "bugs". Well, actually bug, and it's the only one I've found so far (and it's a non-fatal one at that) -- which makes me extremely happy. Unlike our other tweak guides, where I have the cranial gray matter of the other guys on the site to bounce ideas off of, this one was done totally solo. No one else has even come close to picking up a copy of this OS yet. Basically I'm trying to say that any setting specific information in this guide is strictly experimental -- it hasn't been as widely tested as I'd like (all of it works on my system and that's about all I can say for it) -- so be careful. Drivers Windows 2000 drivers are about as hard to come by as a good home-baked pie in the middle of Malaysia (okay, maybe not quite that hard, seeing that they just don't exist here). Driver's Headquarters, which is where I usually point all of the misguided souls that come to me looking for drivers, doesn't support Windows 2000 yet (at least not intentionally -- it all depends on how the respective companies manage their driver pages). So, you basically have two options for finding Win2K drivers. They are: - Manufacturer's website - WindowsUpdate The manufacturers website is your best bet for new drivers at this moment, because at this point WindowsUpdate only has the drivers that were included on the CD. Of course, the drivers that were included on the CD rock -- but newer (when dealing with drivers at least) is almost always better. Firmware Modems and Network cards alike can benefit from the newest firmware. Firmware is like the BIOS for a piece of hardware (like a modem) that can be flash upgraded. V.90 is one type of firmware upgrade, but not the only kind. Firmware updates can generally be found on the manufacturers website. Bugs! Ack -- I don't know about you, but I've never been particularly fond of bugs -- living or digital. And as such, I like squashing them at every opportunity. However, the one bug that I have found in Win2K, which can't be resolved easily, has to do with the Serial ports and modems. I don't know if this applies to people with internal modems (I've got a 3com External), and I'm not sure if it is just a consequence of my peculiar dual-boot setup (take my advice and do not install them both on the same partition -- but more on that in another guide). However, about 1 in 5 boots, my computer refuses to recognize that my modem is installed and turned on. There are two ways that I have found to fix the problem: - Reboot - Reinstall the Modem |
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