Internal Modems: Hung Jury with these modems, fine for general surfing and email/fax/voice (If the modem supports SVD) connectivity etc... they are small and take up minimal space, (Today's internal modems do, in your PC anyway) com port emulation sucks, and clips the modem's wings (If it had wings), there is no way around this with an internal modem. Overall, if you really need to get one, get one with a DSP chip and with or without a hardware controller. (Hardware controllers are like a cpu for your modem, but that doesn't make them faster than sofware modems. Software modems are controlled by your CPU and make the most of your own system power and memory which is MUUUUUUCH faster than a modem with a hardware controller chip that costs an extra 5 bucks over it's software sibling. ALTHOUGH, hardware modems are good for simple plug and play godamnit! Technically, they don't need a driver at all as most of you would know. As firmware updates are few and far between to tweak performance and fix bugs, that's also a downer...especially since a driver for the modem basically does nothing other than give it a name/identifier in your hardware devices list. Whereas, wait for it....software modems are greatly affected by driver changes, and are very beneficial in tweaking performance or fixing bugs, and drivers usually come out a few times for a modem before the company stops sorting tweaked drivers for them. People even mod their own drivers if they teach themselves enough about how modems and drivers work. Last thing to say about them is, if your a modem gamer and want to get an internal modem....make sure it has a DSP chip and supports v.92. To find out wether a hardware or software modem is better for you, (of the internal type) buy both types (internal modem with DSP, Hardware controller and a modem with yes...DSP and software based, buy the modem's sibling if you can for a direct product comparison from the same company) and state to the person at the register that you "are" going to bring one of these modems back, get them to write on the back of the receit about the small agreement and get them to sign it, or if they aren't shifty and it's a well known store just do a verbal agreement. The person at the register may get the manager for you to talk to, deal with him the same way if the person at the register won't/can't do (the agreement) for you. ANYWAY, getting back to the modem gaming side of things, test both of the modems in your computer, ping all your usual gaming servers or whatever you like, adjust the MTU size for different and better ping rates etc...another thing to check is how many errors your modem makes with your isp on the RECIEVE side of things, with error correction on. Error correction prevents and fixes errors and usually if you dial in and get a few, as long as you've got error correction enabled...there should be no more errors on the recieve side. Now ping your servers with error correction on, then on your next dial in, make sure it's disabled before you dial in and re-check those ping times on those servers....if they go down and are consistantly lower than when error correction was enabled, your onto a winning connection tweak...BUT, only have error correction disabled for gaming if you receive no "more" erros after you dial in, because packet loss/****ups play havoc with internet gameplay and spoil all your fun :( . Another thing I wanna say is, internal modems (generally, very much so) use very little electricity. If that means anything to any of you I don't know, it does to me though.

Ok, now.... I hope I covered all that's needed about internal modems. BLAH....next up....

SERIAL MODEMS, as above really except reside outside your PC, they have/need power transformers (extra cords, sockets, and use heaps more electricity (generally) than an internal modem and even USB MODEM!!!! Same problem as above....they use serial ports, they seriously grab your modems balls with throughput and ping times because they can't let enough data through at once! This started happening with the invention of the 28.8 kilo-bit modem, EEEK! But, unlike internal PCI modems (Which the pci bus bandwidth does nothing for because of its serial port emulation, that it needs for some devil forsaken reason!!?!?) this bottleneck can be overcome. You need to buy a high-speed serial port card. This will overcome the bottleneck once you plug your modem into it instead of the motherboard based serial connectors. These cards have a faster 16750 UART with much larger buffers. The serial port card can operate at around 1 Megabyte per second....awesome dude, problem solved, no bottlenecks, yeehar! Still, same as above applies with them, but ofcourse...make sure they have a DSP chip and hardware/software modem is up to you and your computer power and phone line/ISP abilities...as I stated...buy both, test them, take one back, simple really. Just buy the cheaper one though if you don't give a **** about gaming. Since the bottleneck is solved...not much to worry about anymore, for non gamers anyway. Atleast serial modems don't use any of your CPU cycles or system memory, unless a software controlled modem ofcourse :) . But yeah, I'm against them now...serial modems are getting older and are much more cluttering than internal modems or usb modems and use more electicity than either of them, in general. Support will die for these as time goes by, and serial ports are now classed as old hack. But for older comps and just your average mouse clicking on the internet, that doesn't mean ****, keep your serial modem.

USB Modems, Don't win hands down....but pretty close. Computers these days (Consumer home PC's) are full of grunt and are millions of times more powerful than what was used to send man to the moon. That's why, contrary to popular belief, software modems seem to come out on top in many cases compared to hardware controlled modems. (YES EVEN FOR GAMING, but each line/isp etc is different, try both you modem gamers) but yes...getting down to it...USB win's because there's no bottleneck for the maximum throughput of the modem and it's one cable, which sends/recieves data and supplies power to the modem, wooo yeah! My only complaint is that it uses many more system resouces than your internal/serial software controlled modem....(and there's possibility of a little extra lag involved with using USB connections....jury is still out on that though) but as I stated earlier....computers these days are usually way more than capable of losing some CPU cycles etc... and it would have a minimal performance hit...I doubt you could even prove it.

Anyway, it's late....I've racked my brain. If I have missed anything out or you would like an answer to something I haven't stated here, please just post a reply comment and I'll answer it in due time. (Within 24 hours usually)

Since the introduction of the PCs the serial port act as an interface between the PCs and a modem, which are commonly restricted to serial rates of 115,200 bps and with a v.90-v.92 modem line running at 128,000 bps or more, the serial port becomes a bottleneck.

As modem performance improves, transfer of data at speeds of 28.8Kbps, 33.6Kbps, 56.6Kbps and above, they can easily reach the serial port theoretical maximum. (115,200 bps)

The latest V92 compliance 56K modem (if supported by your ISP) will now allow you to up-load (send emails, etc) at the maximum theoretical speed of 50 Kbps. Whereas the older V90 compliance modem up-load speed are limited to 33.6 Kbps.

Data flow between the serial port and the modem is governed by a Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART) chip, which can contain no data buffers, single-byte data buffers or 16-byte data buffers. All data flows between the serial port and the modem via the UART.

Most of today's desktop PCs and notebook are equipped with either 8250, 16450, 16550A (UART) which contain single-byte data buffers. Since most serial ports cannot transmit or receive data at the maximum rate of 115 bps, today's modems far exceed serial port capacity.

In system with non-buffered UART, each byte of data must be processed before the next arrives, to ensure that data bytes are not lost. If the data byte is not processed before the next one arrives, a data overrun occurs and the data byte is lost. If this occurs the entire data packet containing the lost byte must be retransmitted, resulting in reduced throughput.

Manufacturers sought to overcome serial port limitations by implementing bus-based modems or intelligent serial boards. What ever is done, the communications board continues to process information one character at a time. While some parallel-port architecture transfer data in 8 bit segments, eliminating the need for a UART type interface.

THE END.