I’ve recently done a full refresh on a PC whose lady owner was having problems with the third party flavouring of the operating system which had been added by the company who sold her the system. There were also problems running games belonging to the lady’s young son. The OS in use was W98 first edition. Having backed up what few files needed to be backed up, I dropped/recreated the DOS partition, formatted the hard drive, and installed W-ME. (It’s only a 466MHz AMD-K6-2, so didn’t want to overload it with W2000)
Everything went swimmingly. I reinstalled Office 2000, and the young lad reinstalled his games. He was even able to run his Legoland game (which is packaged with some sort of WebCam) – he had never been able to do this before, and I suspect that might be because I installed DirectX 8.1 for them.
One irritating problem remains. The internal K56Flex modem does not function
The mobo is described by the Belarc report as an MSI Aladdin5 ver: 1.0, with American Megatrends BIOS 0626 07/15/95. I tracked down a file called J542A-B.DOC – mobo manual.
At W-ME installation, the OS detects all the devices etc., but fails to detect the modem. Instead, in the list of devices there is a non-functioning device identified as a “PCI Communications Device”. Because it was not functioning I removed it. I then tried to add the modem manually. That appears to work, and the system then reports that
“the device is working properly”. But... I can’t dial out on it – no dial tone detected. Note – at manual installation, the only ports offered for the modem were COM1 and LPT1. I chose COM1. According to the Belarc report, the mouse is a PS/2 mouse – not using a serial port.
On the web, I found
this information about the modem. Seems that the modem is not supported for W-ME.
- Could I use an alternative, generic driver?
- Is it possible that the non-functioning status of the modem could be caused by an IRQ conflict?
