This is the second of seven parts of the story of how I killed my answering machine. How complicated can it be to replace a simple little device with something a little more geeky? About 17 months, $500 and countless hours – that’s how complicated.
Part II: More Modems and Windows
On December 16, 2003 I bought a Lucent 56K V92 PCI Modem off eBay for $9. This was a software-based (controllerless) modem, but supposedly there were Linux drivers as well. By this time I had pretty much given up on Linux. Between poor driver support and trouble just getting the voicemail software installed, it just wasn’t worth it. Instead, I stumbled across CallSoft (via a paid link on Google no less) which was amazingly feature-rich and configurable. Best of all I could just install it and forget about it.
Plan C: Windows
But even using real drivers on Windows, I found a problem. The caller ID worked, but only when there was a name with the number. So if caller ID just returned a number, it didn’t show anything at all. Useless. I installed, uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers on windows over and over again but didn’t have any better luck.
CallSoft seemed to be working well though, so I registered it on Jan 6, 2004 for $50. It still didn’t like the modem though, so I broke down and bought one of the recommended modems for CallSoft. Modem #4 was purchased for $29 on Jan 22.
This new modem finally worked well. It worked for voicemail, the caller ID worked and CallSoft liked it. The only annoying problem is that it displayed an “O” as the caller’s name when only a number was returned from caller ID, but I could live with that.
I also turned on the speech support and downloaded the professional voices from IBM. When a call came in, it would speak the name and number loudly from our office and send a windows popup to my laptop with the number. Voicemail would be recorded and sent via email as an MP3 attachment. For solicitors, I could play a “do not call” message back to them, targed by caller id. I also found that by turning down up the number of rings before answer to 6 or so, most telemarketers wouldn’t wait that long to place a message. This was pretty sweet. I had myself a 40-pound, 120-watt uber-answering machine. I put the old answering machine up in the attic.
Too bad the new machine wasn’t reliable. Sometimes I would come home and find that CallSoft had crashed or just didn’t pick up. After a while the speech stuff stopped working too and it just wouldn’t speak when a call came in. I “fixed” CallSoft’s reliability problems by installing SwitchOff, a little utility that rebooted my “answering machine” every night. It was very annoying that I couldn’t trust my answering machine though. Random people would tell us that our answering machine was broken or didn’t pick up. We always knew when it was 10 pm because we’d hear the “answering machine” reboot from the study.
In October, I got tired of getting kicked off my wireless network every time the phone rang, so I upgraded to a Motorola 5.8 Ghz phone system with two extra handsets. This was great because I could now put the handsets wherever I wanted them rather than where the phone outlets were. I had set up some power line adapters, but because of the how the circuits are laid out in the house, I still had to run a long phone line to get the phone where I wanted it to be. No more. And I now had a phone with lounging reach of the couch. I still occasionally have problems with interference when my phone rings, but I’m not sure it’s worth fixing at this point. 
These purchases had nothing to do with voicemail per se, but they did solve some of my telephony problems, even if CallSoft wasn’t still doing what I wanted.
Next, Part III: Lingo