I have found on my windows 7 PC
Windows fax and scan. Do I need a modem for this as these days we all
use modem wireless routers?
Not likely.
FAX as people knew it was a method of sending pages over the phone line.
It became cheap enough for home and small office usejust before the
internet started to become readily available.
As the internet became very common, the use of fax machines dropped off
dramatically. Most of what could be done could be done through electronic
means, just email that pdf. The only holdouts are some silly institutions
that "don't trust" electronic files, so they still insist on getting
faxes, and they are the ones who still have fax machines. There's no way
to send faxes "over the internet", you are then simply sending a file
electronically, and other methods (like an attachment to email) is the way
to go.
If you don't have a modem, then forget it.
The only alternative, and I doubt it exists much, is an email to fax
server. In the old days, various peopole would set up email to fax
servers, my first ISP had one, so you could send email to it and it would
dial the local number and send the email out as a fax. They were quite
common at one time, kind of useful so long as there was such a server
local to where you needed to send the fax.
The odd thing is, that breaks things for all the reasons people still fuss
over faxes, an intermediate step where the document could be "tampered"
with, yet it was really the same process as if you'd generated the
document electronically and sent it via your modem to a fax machine, the
only difference being the modem was remote at the email to fax server.
I don't think that sort of thing is common nowadays. It was one of those
cool things that was done before the internet got popular, and a lot of
free stuff back then disappeared as the population moved to the internet
and all wanted to use such free things. Or maybe not, maybe they just
faded as the use of fax machines dwindled, most people using the internet
directly to send files.
You could always add a modem if you really want to send a fax. I found
two 33.6K external modems lying on the sidewalk a week ago, one stil had
its ac adapter plugged in (I think the other one's ac adapter was in that
ball of cable and ac adapters, I couldn't be bothered to unknot it all).
Since FAX is a separate standard, any modem beyond some speed, I think
14.4K maybe not even that fast, will work for sending and receiving faxes.
It's not the speed, it's that at some point fax capability was added, and
the fax standard never changed, so you don't need the latest modem. Of
course, now many computers no longer have serial ports, so external modems
aren't so useful.
Michael
