A Core Competence Product Evaluation
Up and Running: Configuring the ISDN Card
The Sportster ISDN 128K is not a Windows 95 "plug and play" card, but installation could hardly have been more straight-forward – simply insert the card into an empty ISA or EISA slot, boot up your PC, install software from the disk provided (typical setup procedure), and run the Sportster ISDN 128K Manager utility. I/O Base Address and IRQ values are set automatically by the configuration utility if jumpers on adapter card are left at factory settings – the only reason to change these is if external NT-1 must be used. If you’ve ever juggled address or IRQ settings, then you know what a great time-saver this Sportster auto-configuration feature can be!
Following a single click on the Configuration Settings button of the Sportster ISDN 128K Manager utility, you’ll be presented with four panels. The General settings panel is used to configure ring patterns and voice call preemption of data calls – this determines how calls you plan to answer from a telephone connected to the Sportster’s analog port will affect your ISDN connection to the Internet. The General settings panel can also be used to select TurboPPP, USR’s enhanced data driver which claims to boost throughput as high as 512Kbps with multilink PPP and compression. We recommend enabling TurboPPP, but found that all other default settings were fine.
The Telephone Company panel must be used to set the ISDN switch type, Service Profile Identifiers (SPIDs), and ISDN phone numbers (in telco-speak, Directory Numbers). The Installed Components panel identifies Windows components which will use the Sportster ISDN 128K card. During our evaluation, we specified WinISDN here – settings for Windows 95 Dial-Up Networking or Windows NT differ. Although the Adapter Card panel can be used to modify I/O Base Address and IRQ settings, you won’t need to do this if you have installed the card with its jumpers set for automatic software configuration.
Of course, you’ll need to create a "dialer" connection to place an ISDN call to your ISP or corporate access server. For our evaluation (Windows 3.11 and OnNet 2.0), we added a new connection to the OnNet dialer, specifying the WinISDN driver, PPP, our hostname, DNS, and network addresses, our username and our password. If you plan to use Windows 95 Dial-Up Networking, just follow the instructions provided by the Make New Connection wizard. If you’re configuring connections under Windows NT, check out the instructions provided on USR’s web site.
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