My modem [Hayes Accura external.fax modem] hangs up after 20-40 minutes. My ISP advised me to reduce the speed to38400. This didn’t help. The Modem Log Shows this: ‘15:20:21 Connection established’, than at ‘15:51:19 -Hanging up the modem’ and again at 15:51:19. ‘Hardware hangup by lowering DTR’. How can I prevent this from occurring ? It is very annoying. Thank you in anticipation.

Modem dropouts mostly occur when the modem is going too fast for other hardware (eg. phone lines in some areas can’t handle the high speeds some modems go at). The first thing to do is (as your ISP suggested) lock your modem down at a lower speed than the modem is designed to go at (ie. if your modem is running at 56k then you should lock it down at 33.6k). The second thing to do is lower the FIFO buffer of your serial card. FIFO stands for First-In First-Out buffer and is the process in which work requests for queues or stacks get processed so that the oldest request is handled next. This in turn makes your serial card and thus your data transfer go faster. This can cause network connection problems though, so I recommend that you reduce the size of this buffer otherwise you could be disconnected. To do this, go to ‘Dial-up Networking’, right click on your ISP’s dial-up connection, and click ‘Properties’. Click the ‘General’ tab and the ‘Configure’ button which is located near the bottom of the window. Click the ‘Connection’ tab in the next window that appears and then the ‘Port Settings…’ button. From here progressively slide both the buffer settings down to the point where you are disconnected. If you are not disconnected on the first reduced setting, then you may be able to increase it until the connection drops out again.