The Book of Ashes

Modem modifications... 10:14AM

So I've done my good deed for the year. I put together an old PC for my nana and poppa so they are now internet enabled. Its a piece of crap but it connects and downloads their email and I put it all together for around $100. I had some problems with the modem though. We were using brother Tom's old modem. A cheap one that required a specific driver to work and this specific driver couldn't control the sound properly. This meant that the entire time you were connected you heard the modem noise at full volume. Its enough to drive a man crazy. So it was either ditch the modem and find another or make some modifications to it. After taking the card out and staring at it I ascertained that the speaker was this little black cylinder thingie, sticking up with a whole at the top and silver inside. Didn't really look like a speaker but everything else was a capacitor or whatever, something I recognised as chip boardy. So my logic went like this... The speaker is only there to give feedback to the user (who theoritically should be able to turn the volumne up or down, theoritically). It won't have any other use so if I removed it then a signal would get sent there (to make sound) but with the connection broken, nothing would happen. It shouldn't affect the workings of the modem, right? So I got out a kitchen knife, jammed it under the modem and ripped the offending bugger off. Now there were two torn metal connections where it used to join to the modem. Should work. Plugged it in and it didn't. But then we couldn't hear what was going on anymore (suprising how much feedback you get from that sound) and it turned out it was just Paradise overloaded. So now it works. The modem dials up fine (so long as Paradise have free lines) without a sound. Sweet... home PC mods