Yeah, OK so they suck.

If in fact what you have is a Winmodem, it isn't just that they suck, but that you may waste a lot of time on it to no avail. I think folks are just trying to save you from wasting your time. If your access is going to remain dial-up for the foreseeable future, and you want to do something that is fairly painless, I'd bid on something like this . Even better than an external modem (will serve multiple machines with NAT). I still have one that is my backup in case my DSL flakes out. It's great. If you couldn't win one of those, you should be able to get an external 56K modem cheap.

Yes, for the 3com "lanmodem" you'd have to invest in an ethernet nic if your machine doesn't already have one, but it's a more worthwhile way to go, IMO.