Hi, I'm trying to help my mother with her computer. Her computer is 56k dial-up modem. She has a dell with windows ME. She just had insight cable digital phone service installed. It has a kind of modem set-up between the cable and the phone line. The cord runs straight from the box to the phone jack (which is what insight told me would fix the problem). I called back and another person told me that there was something I could do to the computer itself to make the connection work, but, they could not tell me what it was. Can you help me?

Well if she has cable phone why doesn't she have cable internet....? If she does it doesn't plug into the phone line but into the ethernet port if she has one.

Thanks for taking the time to reply. She is only on the internet about an hour a month, total. So she is just on netzero's free program. She says she does not use it enough to switch to paid isp. I was just trying to get her back on, period.

Hi there

There could be a number of reasons for this problem, for example, if you have a phone line which has voice mail capabilities, then you often find that when you have a new voicemail message, the dial tone changes to a different tone - this will confuse a dial up modem.

Assuming that there are no other problems, then you might be able to get it working by doing the following:

Click on the Start button in Windows, then select Settings -> Control Panel.

In control panel, double click on the 'Modems' or 'phone/modems' icon (can't remember exactly what its called in ME)

When the modems window opens, select the 'Modems' tab, then click on your dial up modem in the list & click 'properties'

Somewhere in the properties window (check all of the tabs), there should be a setting called 'wait for dial tone before dialing'. Clear the checkbox next to this setting, then click OK.

Let me know if this solves the problem

thanks for trying to help. On a lark I tried adding another phone cord between the wall socket and the line going into her computer, and it works! Yeah! I don't know why that made a difference, but it did. Thanks, again.
Terri

Glad to hear you've resolved it