Well, if you are asking the first question you don’t know me well enough. The second question is a good one though – allow me to explain.

In my company I wear a bunch of hats, one of which happens to be that of IT guy. Back when we moved into the building we are in, I wired the entire network and got the company up to standards in terms of computing. I even hooked up their brand new Xerox to the network so they can use it as a network printer/scanner. Being in the Air Conditioning trade, we have the option on certain accounts to dial into a system and adjust set points and read temperatures without going on-site. Whenever the system doesn’t work – instead of calling the manufacturer, the office calls me. Today was one of those days.

The modem that was spec’d out originally was a Best Data external serial modem – it died. I found a replacement USB model and figured because it was basically the same it would give me the least amount of problems communicating with the system software we use….I was right, but only to a point.

Come to find out, the XP driver for this model was never signed and failed to work properly. It would blue screen XP and cause a never ending reboot cycle that was infuriating. A quick Google search turned up this post on Newegg in the review section. A few edits of the driver later and another attempt proved successful.

Here is what you need to edit in the .inf file:

HKR,,""LowerFilters"",0x00010000,""usbser"", acfva

This is what the line should read after editing:

HKR,,""LowerFilters"",0x00010000,""usbser""

Hopefully, those coming to this page via Google or however they find it – find this information as useful as I did today. So consider this a very long winded answer of why I purchased a dial up modem.