thank you , that clears it up a little , i allredy had a basic idia about ports and how they work but that makes it a lot ezer to understand. verry good explanation.

ok now i have a new problem , 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.