COM ports, Laptop Internal Modems and 'XT Serial' drivers

[Adam Del-Monte]

Hi there,

I'm renovating an old laptop (a Mitac 5033) for my partner, and I'm having
trouble getting the modem to work. When win 2000 boots up the "Found new
Hardware Wizard" appears and I cannot find a driver for it (searching on
machine and internet). If I turn the internal com port for the modem off in
the BIOS, I don't get this error. Whichever, on or off, I still don't get
any com ports to attach the modem to when installing the driver. If I try to
manually 'create' a com port the port 'cannot start' and I've tried a number
of address/IRQ configurations (but not all of them, I got bored after
rebooting the laptop of the tenth time).

Any insights would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

- Adam.

 

[Bob I]

Without proper drivers (Windows 2000 compatible) to interface with the
hardware you are pretty much out of luck. Who really made the Mitac and
is there motherboard drivers for it?

 

[Adam Del-Monte]

Hi Bob,

I'm pretty sure Mitac really made the Mitac! From their web site
(http://mitac.mic.com.tw/service/Dr.htm) one can surf to the following URL
for drivers:

ftp://203.66.161.4/pub/5033/driver/

But there are no 'motherboard' ones - I've downloaded the modem one though.

I should have been a little clearer before, the "Found new Hardware Wizard",
doesn't actually find the modem, it finds "XT serial". I've tried installing
the modem driver as the 'XT serial' it just gives a BSOD.

Any other thoughts Bob?!

Thanks,

- Adam.

 

[Adam Del-Monte]

Oops, forgot to say, Si-Soft Sandra reports that the Mainboard is 'Mitac
5033'. Which either doesn't help much or just tells us its proprietry Mitac
h/w.

 

[Bob I]

Here is what they call it at the location you give.

[Modem]
#PCtel PCT388P
Win95&Win98 7.55S
WinNT40 7.5408

Now going here

http://www.modem-help.com/chipsets.php?mid=125&ncd=8129

This indicates that it's an ISA soft-modem and is "very" CPU and driver
dependant. It also says that driver version

7.66-9M-01 first Windows 2000 support


So your task is to locate the 7.66-9M-01 or later version and the
install instructions. You will need to follow those instructions
explicitly as Windows 2000 will use the drivers to ID the modem to
"install" it. In the meantime you probably should "remove" the modem in
Device manager and disable it in BIOS until you collect the driver and
instructions.

 

[Adam Del-Monte]

Hi Bob,

Thanks for all the help. I've given up, but this is what I tried....

Well after much searching I found driver version 7.66 here:
ftp://ftp.pcchips.com.tw/driver/modem/mod2k.zip

by navigating from http://www.pcchips.com.tw/driver.html

Unfortunately it didn't work.

I had taken the cover off the modem to see the chipset markings and was sure
it actually said '288' and not '388', I double checked and low-and behold
its 288, so its not suprising it doesn't work.

So I tried to find '288 drivers', I couldn't find a 2000 driver, but tried a
NT one:

http://www.wellmodem.com.tw/support/download_sele_modem.html

Which didn't work.

Oh, and in the end I found a plethora of drivers at:
http://members.driverguide.com/inde...5=10&qa6=801&qa7=1799&dp=3&sm=b&jmd=and&fzz=b
(needs free registration)

But a search for my chipset came up with nil.

I've decided my life would be better if I just bought a 2nd hand PCMCIA
modem.

Thanks anyway!

- Adam.

 

[Bob I]

Sorry it didn't work out for you, but on the bright side you can justify
buying a new faster modem!