PCMCIA Modem w/ Old Win95 Laptop

[CrazyAl]

My father came across an old Digital Hinote VP535 laptop, but it was in bad shape (referring to the OS condition, not the physical unit) when he got it, and there were no original driver disks, etc. I reinstalled Windows 95 from an old copy I had, and got everything I needed up and running. However, this unit does not have an internal modem, so we purchased a 3Com Megahertz PCMCIA Card Modem (Model 3CXM556) so that we might surf the 'Net on the laptop. I downloaded the driver for said modem from the manufacturer's website, and the modem seemed to install fine. Much to my dismay, any attempt to connect to the internet failed at the first step: initialising the modem (the ISP could not find the modem). I poked around a bit and eventually found that, if I clicked on the "More Info" button in the Modems portion of Control Panel on the modem (it seems that Windows does recognize the modem as being installed), I got the following error:

"The modem failed to respond. Make sure it is properly connected and turned on. If it is an internal modem or is connected, verify that the interrupt for the port is properly set."

And the following information is provided in the More Info screen:

Port: COM2;

Interrupt: 3;

Address: 2F8;

UART: NS 16550AN;

["Highest Speed" is ghosted and does not give a value];

Identifier: PCMCIA\3COM-3CXM/3CCM56-FDB3

I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling the modem & driver multiple times, but every time yields the same results. Additionally, (if it's any help at all) when I tested the modem with the manufacturer's diagnostics utility (which came with the driver disk), it would fail with: COM port busy. I would consider myself slightly above a layman in terms of computer knowledge, but this is well beyond my (still quite limited) scope of ability. Any help would be greatly appreciated, and let me know if there is any more information you would like/need to know about the system in question.



Thanks,

Al

[Murf]

You need to get into BIOS (SETUP) and enable PCMCIA Card Bus, maybe.

Generally hitting the DEL key at the 1st screen gets you in (or the screen tells you what key to use) once in look around the various menus and you may find one that deals with PCMCIA and/or Modem. Older lappies do not automatically recognize these cards.