I will need to be making 2 or 3 faxes per month and I was looking for some good fax software (preferably freeware) that will fax from Windows through a fax modem. I’ll be faxing PDF docs most of the time. I did a Google search for “fax freeware” and nearly all of the links were for fax services that charged per month.
Any good freeware or cheap software that fax via my modem? Is there any services that are cheap?
Will the fax driver that ships with windows not do what you want?
Yes, the built-in feature should be adequate for what you want to do.
Go to Control Panel, run Add/Remove Programs, click Add/Remove Windows Components, and check the Fax Services box. It will create a virtual printer called Fax. Print to it like any other printer and it will send the documents as faxes.
I strongly recommend against Symantec WinFax. The last “good” version (8.0? 8.5?) was released years ago; the newer versions are buggy and crash-prone as all-git-out.
Even the “good” version has serious issues remembering settings - if you have the fax service running as a service, i.e. so that it works even when someone’s not logged in, the service still gets its settings from the person who’s currently logged in. In other words, when someone logs in to the computer, the fax service settings change. The punchline is that the settings in the default profile (the login profile that is used when a person logs in the first time) has autoanswer turned off. I had a hell of a time fixing this setting in the default profile. It was not one but three separate registry settings, only two of which were in the WinFax subkey.
Another problem we’re seeing with WinFax is caused by the fact that we have a fax machine plugged into the same phone cable as the faxmodem, which we need so that paper faxes can be sent. The fax machine is set to answer after 4 rings (we can’t turn off autoanswer on the fax machine), the faxmodem answers after 2. Except, sometimes the faxmodem never picks up the phone so the incoming fax goes to the fax machine. We thought this was a problem with the faxmodem, so we replaced it, and got the same behavior. I next tried some shareware fax software (which unfortunately did not run as a service) and discovered that the faxmodem picked up every time with that software. I’ve concluded that WinFax sometimes forgets to tell the faxmodem to answer calls.
Utter and absolute frustration, thy name is Symantec WinFax.
send2fax.com - very solid service with much more functionality than any desktop software.