Our office fax machine is broken. How can we fax documents from our computers? Is there a freeware program out there that can do this, or a tool in Windows?
Thanks in advance.
You can fax from your computer locally if you have a fax/modem card. I have one in my Dell and it shipped with BVRP Classic Phone Tools software to manage it. Many modems include fax capability.
There are also services that will fax a file but I don’t know of any that are free. Start with eFax, which offers the ability to receive faxes in the form of email attachments as well as send outgoing faxes for you.
MightyFax offers a free 30-day trial, with full functionality. I’ve used it on occasion and it works great; the user interface is clean and intuitive. If you need to fax paper documents, you’ll need a scanner attached to the computer (or an all-in-one machine which includes scan capability).
If you’ve a faxmodem installed in your computer (You can pick them up very cheap at most electronics stores) and Win XP I can heartily recommend the fax program that comes with it (XP that is).
If you want to fax things other than documents currently in your computer system you will need a scanner of some sort (to load the faxes to the computer), but I’ve been using the windows fax program to send and receive faxes for our business with no problems at all for over a year now.
You can fax out from any modern computer running any modern OS if computer has a faxmodem if you have an available ANALOG phone line. if you’re in an office with newfangled umm, like 1990 DIGITAL phone line … Merlin, Lucent, whatever … and you plug one of those lines into your faxmodem, say goodbye to your faxmodem card… They’ll fry an analog modem pretty much instantaneously.
If your digital phone has a built-in “data” port on its underbelly, that may be an analog outlet specifically for faxing & modem connections in general. But I’d sure call someone who knows before connecting it to my computer.
Obviously, if you can reach your computer with the actual telephone line that goes into the dead FAX machine, that would be safe. Or get a longer line and plug it into that wall jack.
Many offices’ FAX machine walljacks are the only analog phone wiring they’ve still got.
:dubious:
You’re going to need to convice me. Analog modems must deal with voltages as high as 90 VAC and 40 VDC. I don’t know the voltage levels used in a typical digital CBX system, but I can’t imagine they’d greatly exceed the usual range of 5-12 VDC–which is what you’d find inside your computer. No, your analog modem won’t work on a digital system, but fry? I don’t think so.