old pc choaking on modem

[cathodraytube]

i recentley installed windows 98se on my old (circa 1996) PC that was windows 95 , and then the modem wouldent work ,windows dident even detect it . i fugured out it was the drivers. companey that made modem and drivers went out of bussiness...self explanatory what happened from there...so i bot a new modem and it installed fine and has correct drivers , but now the computer crashes and restarts every time i try to dial in . what is wrong now??? im not shur but the proceccer might be too slow for the new modem. cpu is 100MHz i think and minimum requirement for modem is 166MHz i think (so sez the box) could this be it ??? the pc has 32 mb of ram and win 98se and was made in 1995 or 1996.

[cathodraytube]

its the second one ,losing power and restarting. can a modem reely use that much power??? i thot that the modem was the smallest thing power-usage wize in the entire system? i will try replacing the modem (i bout 2 ,1 for the old pc and one for my brand new perfomance pc im building) so hopfley that will be it. if its the power supply im just gunna throw the hole thing out and take the hdd out and put it in my moms pc 4 xtra storage. i just spent 1500$ on my dream pc and im not about to buy a new psu for the 10 yo klunker in the other room. il replace the modem tomorrow ...stay tuned.

[cathodraytube]

ok i switched the modems and its still doing it.... i looked at the psu and its 300 watts wich seems like more than enough for an old macine like this ,unless the psu is worn out? youd think if a psu gos bad it would just quit alltogether ?or is it just reducing its current output gradualy over time, is this how they die???is there anything other than the psu that cold be the cause??

[Lord of the Rings]

Do you use a USB modem? If yes then it's very easy for your modem to have issues when heavy traffic is put thru it. See 3.4 USB-based modems/routers Scroll down to 3.4
Other than that ... as BP said. Also modems can lose communication with the computer if it is overstressed. By the way 32 MB ram is not sufficient for both your system & LW. See bottom of http://www.limewire.com/english/cont...loadfree.shtml 64 MB is recommended bare minimum ram.

[cathodraytube]

it is a pci modem. also let me explain somthing to you , we have 5 computers , an i mac, and older power mac, the old win 95 (now win98se) macine that im talking about in this thread, an HP winxp 512ram p4 1.6 ghz and the brand new unfinished one im building. the hp is the one im using for LW . the old win98se macine with the modem problems is used as a backup web surfing and email computer . iv never had lw on the old one . the onley programs we use on the old one are IE , outlook express ,wordpad and somtimes and old pacman game.