Hi! Welcome to the latest edition of our weekly newsletter, bringing you articles on topics that we feel could help you in the day-to-day use of your home or small business PC. The articles are written by myself, Nathan Forrest of Future Systems (Sussex). I've been helping out as a moderator on the free computer support forums at www.d-a-l.com since they first opened and I have 15 years' experience of residential and small business IT.
Previous articles that you might also be interested in:
Send and receive faxes for nothing Although a lot of people suspect that they can send a fax from their PC (somehow), most have no idea how that could be implemented. Yet it is surprisingly simple. I have to admit that, until recently, I had tried to avoid the whole subject of faxing from a computer, knowing that faxes are becoming less popular and are now superseded by email messages for most of our communication needs. Occasionally though, it is still useful to be able to send a fax, perhaps to a Council or Government department or an insurance company, where faxes might still get through to the right person more quickly and easily.
Until a couple of weeks ago, my last experience of faxing from a PC was back in the days of Windows 95, when you had to install proprietary "communications console" software that came with your fax modem. These were often cumbersome to use and unreliable. So, when I set up a Windows XP computer to send faxes in about 5 minutes, I couldn't believe that I had deprived myself of the ability to send a fax easily for the last 10 years!
Why is the title of this article "Send and receive faxes for nothing"? Well, I certainly don't mean "for no reason". The beauty of faxing is that, as long as you have a fax-enabled modem inside your PC (almost all "dial-up" modems can also send faxes) and it is connected to a telephone line, then it costs nothing to send a fax, apart from the length of the phone call required to transmit the fax message, which is typically just a minute or two. There is no need to sign up to any additional service - the fax call is charged exactly the same as a regular telephone call. In fact, if you have a Voice Over IP (VoIP) line as part of your broadband / DSL service or an inclusive phone calls package on your telephone line, then you could potentially be sending faxes at absolutely no cost at all. You don't even need an Internet Service Provider (ISP) - sending a fax doesn't actually use an Internet connection because it connects directly to the recipient's fax machine in exactly the same way as when you make a telephone call down a regular telephone line.
Windows 2000 has a built-in fax console, which is pretty straightforward to set up (full details can be found on Microsoft's web site here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/227194). Windows Vista has developed this into Windows Fax and Scan, which combines faxing and scanning in one console, in the Business, Ultimate and Enterprise editions. Windows XP's built-in fax console (included in all versions) is even easier to set up than in Windows 2000 - it's the XP version that we'll be looking at as this is the operating system that most of you use.
In an office environment, you can set up faxing on a server and share it across the network to all other PCs. Each user will be able to "print" a document, email message, etc. to the fax "virtual printer" on the server - I will explain how that works later in the article. This article will cover the steps required to set up faxing on a home or home office desktop or laptop PC. In a business environment, the process is similar but it is configured on the server and then shared.
Firstly, you need to ensure that you have a fax modem installed in your PC. Almost all laptops running Windows XP will have an integrated 56k (sometimes referred to as "v90" or "v92") dial-up modem that is fax-enabled. Many older desktop PCs will have a modem fitted as an internal add-in card as this was the way of accessing the Internet before broadband / DSL became popular. Now that so many people are using broadband / DSL or Ethernet network connections, however, most desktop PCs manufactured within the last couple of years have not been manufactured with a dial-up modem as standard. To check:
1. Click the Start Menu and then right-click My Computer and select Properties from the menu.
2. Select the Hardware tab and then click the Device Manager button.
3. Expand the Modems list to see if any detected modems are shown (see Figure 2). Many fax modems will include the word "fax" in the description shown here. Other than that, there is no single method for determining whether a modem is fax-enabled at this stage so you may need to refer to your system's original documentation.
Figure 2.
If your desktop or laptop PC does not have a fax modem, one can be purchased and fitted easily, either as an internal card or an external serial- or USB-connected device. Expect to pay £25 ($50 USD) or less at your local computer store for an internal fax modem for a desktop PC. So, once you know that you have a fax modem installed, you can proceed to the Windows XP Fax Console. Even if you are not sure whether your modem supports faxing, you will be able to find out now.
4. Select the Start Menu > All Programs > Accessories > Communications > Fax > Fax Console.
5. If this is this the first time that you've used the Fax Console, the Fax Configuration Wizard will launch automatically (see Figure 3). If it does not, you can open the Tools menu and select Configure Fax.
Figure 3.
6. Click Next and enter your details in the form such as your name, fax number and postal address. These details are optional but anything that you fill in can later be automatically inserted in one of the included fax cover page templates.
7. After clicking Next to proceed to the following screen, you will be able to select a detected modem. You will then have the option to either send faxes only or to be able to both send and receive faxes (see Figure 4).
Don't be too hasty here - if you choose to be able to receive faxes through your PC as well as send them, this requires a little consideration. In a home or home office environment at least, it is likely that you only have one telephone line and one telephone number. Your telephone number will also be your fax number. The fax modem will be connected to a socket in the house that routes back to that one telephone line/number. Do you really want your PC to try to answer all phone calls as if they were an incoming fax? You can set the number of rings that the PC will wait for before answering the incoming call so you can have time to answer calls yourself. If you answer a call and you can hear noises down the line that suggest that a fax is coming in, you can hang up the phone and the sender's fax machine will usually re-dial your number for a second attempt within a few minutes. Another consideration is that you can't have an answering machine running at the same time as your PC is waiting for incoming faxes - one of them will have to answer incoming calls after a certain number of rings and that will stop the other one from answering. Of course, your PC can only answer incoming calls whilst it is switched on so, if you switch off your PC when you go out, then you can have an answering machine picking up the calls in your absence.
Figure 4.
8. The next screen allows you to specify a TSID, which is something that appears in the header of fax pages that are printed on the recipient's fax machine. It is common practice to enter at least your fax number here and sometimes the business name or your own name, although the number of characters allowed is rather limited.
9. The same information is usually entered on the next screen as the CSID (see Figure 5). This is sent back to fax machines that are trying to transmit faxes to you, for example on the delivery confirmation report that some senders' fax machines will generate.
Figure 5.
10. On the following screen, you can choose to have incoming faxes automatically printed through your printer (remember to leave the printer switched on!) and/or copied to a folder on your hard drive.
11. That's it! The following screen confirms your settings. Click Finish. Sending a fax can be done in one of two ways. You can use the Fax Console to write a new fax message using one of the included fax cover page templates (click the New Fax button on the left of the toolbar). Alternatively, you can choose to send an email message, Microsoft Word document, Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, etc. as a fax by opening it in the appropriate application and then simply printing it to the fax "virtual printer" (see Figure 6). Doing this will launch the same wizard that you will see if you choose to write a fax message from scratch through the Fax Console.
Figure 6.
12. Once your document has been sent to the fax "virtual printer", the Send Fax Wizard will launch automatically (see Figure 7). You can then either type the recipient's name and fax number or click the Address Book button to look the person up in your contacts list, e.g. from Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express.
Figure 7.
13. Once you have typed the recipient's details or selected them from your Address Book, click the Add button to insert them into the list of recipients in the lower half of the screen. You can then continue to add more recipients for the same fax message if required. Click Next once you are done.
14. The following screen allows you to choose a cover page if you wish. You can also type a message subject line and your own text message body to insert into the cover page. Click the Sender Information button to choose which of your personal details you wish to have displayed on the cover page such as name, fax number, etc. By default, these are the details that you entered during the initial Fax Configuration Wizard in step 6 above.
15. The following screen has options that you will probably leave on the default settings. You can set the priority for this fax message in the queue, although this is only relevant if you send so many faxes that there are normally some queued up. You can also set the time to send the fax (the default is "now") in case you can benefit from cheaper call rates when you send faxes in the evening or over the weekend, for instance.
16. On the last screen, you can preview the fax, which will show the cover page (if you selected one) with all of the details inserted and the document that have chosen to send after the cover page.
17. Once the Send Fax Wizard has been completed, the Fax Monitor screen will open to show the progress of the fax being sent (see Figure 8). This may take a few minutes, particularly if the recipient's fax machine is busy and your fax has to be queued to retry later. If you don't want to watch the progress, you can minimise the Fax Monitor window and continue working on other tasks on the PC.
Figure 8.
Once the fax has been sent, a confirmation message will be displayed. Although this article may seem rather long with a lot of steps involved, the process is actually pretty simple. We have shown you all of the main details here in order to describe it in as clearly as possible. With a basic understanding of what a fax normally looks like and what information it usually contains on the cover page, you can whizz through the configuration of the fax modem and sending your first fax in a matter of minutes.
Nathan Forrest - Future Systems ( Sussex ) http://www.futuresystems-sussex.co.uk
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