Pcmcia modem problem

I can't dial the internet on my laptop. I've gone through the trouble
shooter and nothing comes up wrong.

Control Panel - Pcmcia lists the card correctly.

Control Panel - Modems lists it correctly and detects it as attached to
COM2, interrupt 3 2F8.

Diagnostics Driver lists comm.drv altho I have gone through the process
of installing the Xircom driver from CD.

Diagnostic More Info reports modem fails to respond.

The pre-dial window shows nothing but a flashing cursor.

HELP!

Jim L

--
Should the Americans have left the Germans in France? Parley vous
Deutsch?

Boot into Safe mode and then go to Control Panel, System, Device Manager.
Remove all devices in any category that are duplicated that shouldn't be.
Remove all devices listed under Other. Remove all devices that are no
longer on your system. Remove all modems listed. Once this is done, close
to exit Device Manager. Say no to restarting then Exit and Shut down
Windows. After a few seconds, start your system and reinstall the modem if
it is not automatically installed during the boot.

If the modem still fails to respond, it is possible that the modem has
failed. See if you can test it in another computer.

PattyL

wrote in message
...
I can't dial the internet on my laptop. I've gone through the trouble
shooter and nothing comes up wrong.

Control Panel - Pcmcia lists the card correctly.

Control Panel - Modems lists it correctly and detects it as attached to
COM2, interrupt 3 2F8.

Diagnostics Driver lists comm.drv altho I have gone through the process
of installing the Xircom driver from CD.

Diagnostic More Info reports modem fails to respond.

The pre-dial window shows nothing but a flashing cursor.

HELP!

Jim L

--
Should the Americans have left the Germans in France? Parley vous
Deutsch?

Thanks for your help.

Boot into Safe mode and then go to Control Panel, System, Device

I don't know how to do that. During reboot I banged on enough keys that
I think Safe Mode came out of sheer surrender.

Manager. Remove all devices in any category that are duplicated that
shouldn't be.

I found one dupe. When I deleted it an entry named Modem showed up for
the first time. But it was gone after rebooting.

Remove all devices listed under Other. Remove all
devices that are no longer on your system.

In my case it more devices I never had. Both my laptop and Win98 are
new to me.

then Exit and Shut down Windows. After a few seconds, start your
system and reinstall the modem if it is not automatically installed
during the boot.

I reinstalled it manually. It shows both the XircoCom driver and
Microsofts comm.drv. The card is an Intel/Xircom RealPort2 Pro/100
Cardbus combo Ethernet + modem PCMCIA card.

Frankly I keep seeing things in various properties that seem to be
talking PC talk instead of laptop talk. That is, usually references to
PCI rather than PCMCIA. Is there no difference?

It still looks confusing or confused about ports, etc. The first time,
it came up on COM2. After reinstallation it showed up on COM4. Somehow
that changed to COM3, INT4 3E8. While properties elsewhere showed the
card on INT11. In one place it says flow control is on hardware and
another says it's on software.

On running the modem diagnostic it says to go to the device manager and
check the ports. There is no ports entry in the device manager. May I
assume that's not normal?

If the modem still fails to respond, it is possible that the modem has
failed. See if you can test it in another computer.

No other computer with a PCMCIA port.

I suppose the modem could be bad, even though it is a new PCMCIA combo
card.

Thanks for the help and TIA.

Jim L

--
Should the Americans have left the Germans in France? Parley vous
Deutsch?

Sorry for not giving instructions on booting into Safe Mode. For future
reference, hold the CTRL key during the boot process to display the boot
menu and then choose Safe Mode from the list.

Since this is a new card, I suggest that you contact Xircom to see what it
should look like in Device Manager. They should also be able to take you
through diagnostics on the card to test the card. Whether a port shows up
under Ports or in the properties of your combo net card/modem depends on how
Xircom wrote the driver. Each manufacturer does it somewhat differently so
there is no hard and fast rule as to how this should look in Device Manager.

Yes there is a difference between PCI and PCMCIA. All devices that are on
PCMCIA cards should show up as PCMCIA, not PCI. If they are showing up as
PCI devices, then the wrong driver is probably installed. If you are
looking at devices that are internal to the computer, then they may very
well show up as PCI - such as the hard drive controller.

Is this a new laptop or one that has been used? Did you get a restore disk
with it? If this is not a new computer, then my suggestion would be to run
the restore (hopefully this came with the laptop). That would take the
system back to the software that was installed when the computer was
purchased new. This also means that you would lose any software that was
installed on the system since that time unless you have the disks to
reinstall. You would also lose any data on the computer so if you have
created any documents that you wish to save, be sure to back them up before
running the restore. If you didn't get the restore CD, then hopefully you
can contact the party you purchased the system from and get one. The
license agreement that goes with the computer and the operating system says
that they must stay together. The restore CD is probably not usable on any
other computer except one identical to yours.

Doing this would give you a clean system with only the operating system and
any programs that were preinstalled. You would not have the confusion of
hardware devices that are no longer on the system or perhaps were
incorrectly installed.

PattyL



wrote in message
...
Thanks for your help.

Boot into Safe mode and then go to Control Panel, System, Device

I don't know how to do that. During reboot I banged on enough keys that
I think Safe Mode came out of sheer surrender.

Manager. Remove all devices in any category that are duplicated that
shouldn't be.

I found one dupe. When I deleted it an entry named Modem showed up for
the first time. But it was gone after rebooting.

Remove all devices listed under Other. Remove all
devices that are no longer on your system.

In my case it more devices I never had. Both my laptop and Win98 are
new to me.

then Exit and Shut down Windows. After a few seconds, start your
system and reinstall the modem if it is not automatically installed
during the boot.

I reinstalled it manually. It shows both the XircoCom driver and
Microsofts comm.drv. The card is an Intel/Xircom RealPort2 Pro/100
Cardbus combo Ethernet + modem PCMCIA card.

Frankly I keep seeing things in various properties that seem to be
talking PC talk instead of laptop talk. That is, usually references to
PCI rather than PCMCIA. Is there no difference?

It still looks confusing or confused about ports, etc. The first time,
it came up on COM2. After reinstallation it showed up on COM4. Somehow
that changed to COM3, INT4 3E8. While properties elsewhere showed the
card on INT11. In one place it says flow control is on hardware and
another says it's on software.

On running the modem diagnostic it says to go to the device manager and
check the ports. There is no ports entry in the device manager. May I
assume that's not normal?

If the modem still fails to respond, it is possible that the modem has
failed. See if you can test it in another computer.

No other computer with a PCMCIA port.

I suppose the modem could be bad, even though it is a new PCMCIA combo
card.

Thanks for the help and TIA.

Jim L

--
Should the Americans have left the Germans in France? Parley vous
Deutsch?

On 11/12/2004 at 04:08 PM, "PattyL" said:

Yes there is a difference between PCI and PCMCIA. All devices that are
on PCMCIA cards should show up as PCMCIA, not PCI. If they are
showing up as PCI devices, then the wrong driver is probably

I see more things that seem philosophycally tied to PCI. Like a
question in a setup window, is this modem internal or external? The
actual ThinkPad modem, when present, is internal and PCI. The
Intel/Xircom is neither internal nor external, but in a port. But I
also see "PCI" used in places that are dealing with the PC card.

Is this a new laptop or one that has been used? Did you get a restore
disk with it? If this is not a new computer, then my suggestion would
be to run the restore (hopefully this came with the laptop). That
would take the system back to the software that was installed when the

It's a ThinkPad 770E. The seller deliberately removed the OS and sold
it as computer only. eBay is very quick to bow to the Bill Gates gang
when they say you can't let anyone sell Microsoft operating systems.
That even goes for sealed retail packages.

The seller left enough pieces to let me install from a CD I bought
separately. Perhaps I should have formatted the disk, but I didn't.

As I said, I'm not well versed in Win98, but I just don't see it doing
that great a job with PCMCIA.

Jim L

--
Should the Americans have left the Germans in France? Parley vous
Deutsch?

The problem with not having the restore disk is that this is where you find
all the drivers for the components that shipped with the computer
originally. Almost any PC that was manufactured after the release of Win98
will have hardware that does not have drivers included with Win98 and the
restore CD would have installed these drivers during the restore process.
Laptops also tend to have proprietary hardware and the drivers were not
included with the OS even if the OS was written after the hardware was
manufacturered so you need to get drivers from the manufacturer.

Operating systems can be sold at retail. Only the OEM releases that were
intended to be the original operating system, have written into their
license agreement that they can only be sold with hardware. The license
agreement for OEM Windows is that it must stay with the original hardware so
you should have received the restore software that shipped with the system.
Even if you got a generic OEM Windows, it would not have the drivers needed
for your hardware since those are only available from IBM by download or on
the restore CD that is created by them for this system.

I don't know if you've been to the IBM download site but there appear to be
a lot of drivers available for this product:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/si...?validate=true

PattyL


wrote in message
...
On 11/12/2004 at 04:08 PM, "PattyL" said:

Yes there is a difference between PCI and PCMCIA. All devices that are
on PCMCIA cards should show up as PCMCIA, not PCI. If they are
showing up as PCI devices, then the wrong driver is probably

I see more things that seem philosophycally tied to PCI. Like a
question in a setup window, is this modem internal or external? The
actual ThinkPad modem, when present, is internal and PCI. The
Intel/Xircom is neither internal nor external, but in a port. But I
also see "PCI" used in places that are dealing with the PC card.

Is this a new laptop or one that has been used? Did you get a restore
disk with it? If this is not a new computer, then my suggestion would
be to run the restore (hopefully this came with the laptop). That
would take the system back to the software that was installed when the

It's a ThinkPad 770E. The seller deliberately removed the OS and sold
it as computer only. eBay is very quick to bow to the Bill Gates gang
when they say you can't let anyone sell Microsoft operating systems.
That even goes for sealed retail packages.

The seller left enough pieces to let me install from a CD I bought
separately. Perhaps I should have formatted the disk, but I didn't.

As I said, I'm not well versed in Win98, but I just don't see it doing
that great a job with PCMCIA.

Jim L

--
Should the Americans have left the Germans in France? Parley vous
Deutsch?

On 11/14/2004 at 06:36 AM, "PattyL" said:

Even if you got a generic OEM Windows, it would not have the drivers
needed for your hardware since those are only available from IBM by
download or on the restore CD that is created by them for this system.

I guess I didn't say what I thought I said. I have a whole CD full of
Xircom stuff I got from IBM. I've also copied it onto the laptops hard
drive.

What I thought I said is that every time I point it at a Xircom driver
it INSTANTLY starts loading an old w98 driver, declaring the selected
driver to be unrelated to the adapter. And this when I've traced over
and over the Xircom docs and found it to explicitly say that driver is
the one needed for this erxact adapter. It's like the OS is saying
screw you, I'll do it my way. I've done this over and over. Over and
over it says the specified driver is unrelated to the adapter and loads
the old w98 stuff.

I'm not certain a Xircom driver should be the main pcmcia interface, but
the system refuses the .inf file, as I said, instantly. That suggests
to me that the w98 pcmcia.drv should be replaced by a Xircom driver,
particularly given that w98 sees the modem, but Xircom utilities don't.

That is to say, some parts of w98 see the modem and some don't. One w98
utility told me This device is functioning properly. Another said it
was not reponding. This confusion of responses seems to me to be saying
"wrong driver." But it won't install the ones called for.

If I know how to unhide the hidden files I'd try substituting what's
called for in place of what's installed.

Jim L, via eCS 1.14 version of OS/2

--
Should the Americans have left the Germans in France? Parley vous
Deutsch?