Is there a thingy I can download somewhere to make this happen?
If your internet connection is DSL, there’s no need - they don’t conflict. But you must have a DSL filter on your phone.
If it’s dialup, I would think so, but it won’t be software, you’ll need a device. The facility that prevents this happening is called barge-in protection, so you want a phone line sharing device where that can be disabled. The requirement is unusual enough that I think your going to have to find a local supplier of a likely-looking device and ask them to confirm it works the way you want.
The capability you are looking for is called “Modem on Hold”, and it is supported by v.92 capable modems. It can detect incoming calls and prompt you to ignore it, take the call and disconnect, or, with ISP support, put the data connection on hold for a short time. You need to have Call Waiting, though.
First, tell us how you are connected to the internet; dial-up, DSL modem, cable modem, wireless or other?
Second, and less germane, why do you want the internet to disconnect for an incoming call?
If your connection is dial-up and you are missing important calls because you are busy surfing the 'Dope, then the solution is simple. Your modem dial string is prefaced with a *70 (IIRC, it’s been awhile). Remove the *70 and incoming calls will hangup on your internet connection and allow you to answer the call.
There were once modems or separate devices which could place the internet connection on “hold” while you used the phone, then switch back to the internet automatically, but I never used one, so don’t know the details of it.
ETA: what Cleophus said.
I have dial up…don’t guees you could tell me how to remove the *70?
Start==>Control Panel==>Network Connections==>(your dial-up connection)==>Properties==>Phone number, and remove the *70 from the front of the number.
It’s been a long time since I used a dialup connection, but I never ever saw a dialing string that automatically put *70 at the front. Depending on your settings, it will add a 1 for long distance, or a 9 for outside line, etc., but it won’t put anything else there unless you tell it to.
YMMV
It’s been a long time for me too, so I may be wrong about this. I think the *70 thing was explicitly for call waiting (it would disable call waiting while you were on dialup, or if you dialed it before making a call). I remember this because I never had call waiting, so I never needed to worry about it.
Mad, we went through this identical hassle several years ago. We couldn’t figure out the *70 thing, either, so we experimented with a couple of Little Black Boxes that were supposed to disconnect your Internet upon incoming calls. Neither of them worked right (that is, once we figured out how to install and configure them :rolleyes: ), and our eventual solution was to pop for a second phone line (a land line) just for the Internet. It was a nominal fee to have the guy come out and drill holes in our baseboard and dining room floor to run the cable (IIRC we had to have an electrician do that), and then a guy from the phone company had to come out and do something mysterious at the phone box outside, and after that it was only an extra $9 a month added to our phone bill.
Sorry to sidetrack this, but are you aware that you can get DSL service for as little as $13 a month if you have a year contract? It goes up after the end of the contract, but you can supposedly re-negotiate the rate at that time. Rather than waste money and effort on getting the dial-up to work the way you want it, why don’t you just switch to DSL? I would think it’s cripplingly slow to have dial-up these days.
Yes, but DSL has to be available at your address. We live where it is not available.