JVS Computers©

      12/11/2010

A lot could be said about modems.  I'll keep it short.

If you want to connect to the WWW, you'll need one of these in one form or another.  Currently the most popular is the "dial-up" or telephone type modem, that uses the same lines as telephones.  Of these there are two primary types.

First, the software modem, also called a "Win Modem"  These modems depend heavily on the CPU for their operation.  On low-end systems you might notice a drag on the system during dial-ups or while downloading.  The upside is that they are considerably less expensive.

Hardware modems are more expensive, but are far less taxing on the system resources. 

Other considerations:  There are internal and external modems, internal being the most popular by far.  There are ISA modems (slower) and PCI modems (faster).

Then there are  many much faster options.  I am very fond of the idea of satellite type connections (like DirecTV's Direct DSL.  It's super fast and doesn't tie up the phone line.  It's also somewhat pricey.

V.90 is the old standard, The next new thing is V.92  It has muy mucho bells and whistles!  The bad news is that many ISP's don't support it yet.

NICs

Network Interface Cards (NIC) are used to connect PC's to one another through a network.  Even though the port looks like a phone line type port, it's not.  The "phone" type port is called an RJ-11, and the NIC port is an RJ-45, and they are not interchangeable.

Networking PC's makes some cool things possible, like sharing one dial-up connection, or sharing printers.  There are also wireless networking options, but make sure there are sufficient funds in your checking account!