I need help figuring this one out..I've got a Cardinal 33.6k (hardware) modem, that I know worked prior to my getting it (got it from a buddy who got a new one), but now on my system, it will initialize, but just sit there. I don't know if it is superslow, or if it just no longer works, and I should get a new one. My buddy had no clues either....

well unlike winmodems hardware modems have jumpers and such to change their settings. You could have a irq/com port conflict due to your motherboard settings of your serial (com) ports or it could be conflicting with another piece of hardware.

How would a newbie go about checking for conflicts, setting jumpers, etc....

I got an e-machine
800MHz cely, 1 serial port for modem, 1 USB port (not being used), a parallel port (not being used yet-saving for printer), so what does this girl look for?

If you need to have your serial port then try this and if it works try the rest. For a quick check and possible fix try disabling the serial port in your bios.

If it is truly a hardware modem with jumpers and everything look at the card itself. Some of the cards that I have used actually have the jumper assignments written on them. Normally Com1 (serial port) is assigned to irq 4. Therefore what you need to do is look for some jumpers and find the docs on how to setup the modem on a different COM port than one. Preferably this would be either 2 or 4 since 1 and 3 share irqs and 2 and 4 share irqs.

Is this an internal modem or an external?

Check this page out.

Look under the section for Installing Mgetty on the CommPlete and MultiModemISI Cards. and there was all I could find on them.