How to Set Up Your PC as a Fax
With the advent of fax/data modems for personal computers that are priced under $150, it’s reasonable to consider equipping your computer as a supplemental fax machine for your office.
Neither a stand-alone fax machine, with its ease of use and flexibility, nor a computer fax system, offering superior clarity, is perfect for all uses. But one or the other will be ideal in any given situation, so it makes sense to have both.
Sending a fax directly from your computer is best when the material was created in that computer--in the form of a word processing document, spreadsheet table or complex report that mixes text and tables and graphics. The quality at the receiving end will be better too.
But when you want to fax a newspaper clipping, pages from a book, an invoice or a printed report, it’s probably easier to use a stand-alone fax machine. It’s certainly faster.
Sometimes you shouldn’t send a fax, but a text file instead. An example is when the recipient needs to incorporate the information into something he or she is writing. That’s when a service such as MCI Mail is the best means of communication. It allows you to send electronic mail to other MCI Mail customers.
Some people find that the ideal combination is to send faxes from a PC and receive them on a stand-alone fax.
The starting place for any of this is the modem, such as Practical Peripherals’ Practical Modem 2400FX96, commonly discounted below its $139 suggested price. It is an internal board for standard PC/AT-compatible computers that combines a normal 2,400-baud data modem with a 9,600-baud fax modem. The fax modem is compatible with all Group III fax machines, the most common system used worldwide.
The system includes Quick Link II fax software capable of sending and receiving fax as well as standard data communications. It works quickly and easily for text documents. You’ll have to convert word processor files into plain text first, however.
If you use Windows, you’ll probably want to preserve the graphics and multiple type styles in your documents when you fax them. That’s a good reason to own Winfax Pro 2.0., $119 from Delrina Technology. It works with most fax modems and is the fanciest, and probably easiest, way to send and receive faxes from inside Windows.
Winfax Pro 2.0 pretends to be a printer available to all of your Windows applications. When you want to send a fax from one of those applications, you “print” it to the printer named Winfax Pro instead of to your normal printer.
Being able to print out on regular paper, especially at laser printer quality, is one of the big advantages of receiving faxes in your computer.
If you also have software that performs optical character recognition, such as FAXGrabber, $149 from Calera Recognition Systems, you can convert text contained in received faxes back into the kind of text file that you can work with in the computer.
