Hi,

sorry for a question which may sound silly to most of you but I don't like to experiment with our old "grandfather PCs".

set-up:

two PCs, one Win98SE and one Win98 on a peer 2 peer LAN. each PC has own dial-up modem and individual phone line and each PC has 12 dial-up options (3 ISPs with multiple dial-in lines).

occasionally a phoneline or a modem has a problem and one PC can not connect.

Question:

if I set up an internet connection over the LAN to the second PC will I lose all my dial-up options or will I still be able to select if I want to conect via dial-up OR LAN, or will the PC automatically connect over the LAN without giving me a choice?

And if I have a choice, where will it show? as it is now I get the list of dial-up connections to select, where will the LAN connection show up?

a related question:

recently got a new modem (Aztech 56K USB V.92). Does anybody have experience with this one? it does not work on one PC and works on the second one at a VERY slow speed (below 20k) IF it manages to connect (about 1 in 15 tries!!) at all.

Thanks

opalhort

The way windows dial-up connections work, the latest default gateway will take precedence. Therefore, if you had the second computer setup to use the internet through the lan (gateway 192.168.0.1), if you dialed a connection on the second computer, it will use that dialup connection instead (new default gateway). If you had an ADSL modem connected, and dialed up using that, it will then use that. If you had an ISDN modem, etc. etc.etc. Disconnect the line (in windows) and it will revert to the old setting.

Analog modems are very strange beasts. It's really luck of the draw what modem will work best with your line/ISP.

there is a command in DOS called "route"..

You have to issue a specific routing rule that directs all traffic to the desired network through a specific network interface in your case.. you need to open the command prompt and type:

ipconfig /all (and note down the interface number of the modem)

and then:

ROUTE ADD <destination> MASK <dest-IP-mask> <gateway-IP> METRIC 2 IF <interface no>