Since selling off my old spare XP powered PC, I have not had a machine from which I could fax. My old Intel 536EP PCI modem worked for XP, Vista and Windows 7 32-bit, but unfortunately not for 64-bit anything, and both the new spare, laptop and my production machine all run Windows 7 64-bit.

The Toshiba laptop doesn’t have an RG11 socket, and I wasn’t about to pay in excess of $60 for a USR internal Windows 7 friendly analogue modem, or for that matter, $60 for a USR USB modem. Yes, I know. USR modems are the most reliable and best on the market, but I only want it for faxing small business that stills sees the ‘Iron Age’ fax as cutting edge.

This is what I bought, $8 under list price from the clearance bins in my local TigerDirect.

It is an Ultra U12-40642 External USB Fax Modem - 56K v.92, USB 2.0, same colour as the photo, neat, compact and appears to work at a reasonable speed. I sent a two page fax to HP’s fax test number, and it completed the send part of the task in 37 seconds on a good quality telephone patch cable. Receive was equally fast.

The supplied telephone patch cable is possibly the cheapest bit of junk I have ever seen. I never bothered to try it as it would not reach any telephone outlet from a reasonable distance.

Negative reviews on the product tend to come from people who received it by mail order. I don’t do that unless absolutely necessary. As a result, mine works very well indeed, and will work for all three computers on the home network.

If you register it on the Ultra website, you get a 3 year warranty cover from date of purchase. Needless to say, I registered mine ‘just in case’