NewDeal Technical Support Document 216

THE COMPLETE COMMUNICATOR


How to setup and use your Complete Communicator with NewDeal software

Note: The Complete PC, the company who made The Complete Communicator, is no longer in business. Boca Research took over the product line and now markets an upgraded version called The Complete EZ fax modem, which is not directly compatible with NewDeal software. You can still find The Complete Communicator at some local retailers, or through some mail order computer supply retailers.

General Information

Hardware

The Complete Communicator fax board must be correctly installed. Out of the box, the board is set up to default to COM2 IRQ3. You can change it to COM1 IRQ4 using DIP switches on the board. These are the only choices available, it does not support COM3 or COM4.

The Complete Modem is like the Complete Communicator, except that it does not include voice mail and it costs less. Customers report that some of the later models of The Complete Modem can be made to work with The Complete Communicator fax support. The fax routine will convert a document and send it to CF.COM (the Complete Modem's equivalent of CC.COM) but will not dial. The user can then go run CF by hand, dial, and send faxes. The Complete Communicator Gold and the Complete Communicator EZ are not supported directly by NewDeal software.

Software

You need V2.60 or higher of The Complete Communicator software. You must run CCBACK before running your NewDeal software. The most convenient way to do this is to add the following lines to your AUTOEXEC.BAT file:
CD\CC
CCBACK
CD\
The Complete Communicator driver in NewDeal software is installed in the same way a printer is.

You won't be able to view or print faxes you receive from within your NewDeal software. You can, however, create a launcher that runs the DOS-based CFAX program, which came with The Complete Communicator, to view and print faxes, or to check on the status of an outgoing fax.

Setting up The Complete Communicator

  1. Run CCBACK, either from a DOS prompt or in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file.
  2. Launch Preferences. Click on the Modem button. Select the COM port for The Complete Communicator.
  3. Click on the Speed and Format Options button. Select 2400 for the baud rate. Click on OK.
  4. Click on OK to close the Modem dialog box.
  5. Click on the Printer button. Click on New.
  6. In the Install New Printer dialog box, select FAX for Type of Device. A new list of devices appears. Click once on The Complete Communicator Fax Modem. Note that the name of the device is "Complete Communicator Fax Modem on Unknown." The Unknown simply means that any output will be sent to the port you selected for your modem during step 2.
  7. Click on OK.
  8. Click on Close to close the Printer dialog box.
  9. Close Preferences.

Sending Faxes

  1. Open the document you want to fax.
  2. Under the File menu, choose Fax. A dialog box appears.
  3. If The Complete Communicator is not listed, click on the listed printer. A list of installed printers will drop down. Click on The Complete Communicator Fax Modem.
  4. Look for the section which appears in the dialog box with the title "Complete Communicator Options."
  5. Enter the phone number you want to send the fax to. If you want to look up the fax number using NewDex, you must put the last name of the person in the phone number section, then click on the Use NewDex button.
  6. If you want to fax a cover sheet, click on the Yes button. Click on the Show Cover Sheet button to fill out the cover sheet.
  7. To send the fax, click on the Print button.

Advanced Tip - Loading CCOM in Upper Memory

The trick with loading the Complete Communicator's very large TSR (CCOM) is that it needs to be loaded in the first part of the upper memory area. CCOM needs to load just above the 640K limit, not just below the 1024K mark. This is because of the way the Complete Communicator sees and uses memory. This information is from the technical staff at the Complete PC.

Force CCOM to load high near or at the beginning of your AUTOEXEC.BAT file. This means that you might not be able to unload it at the DOS prompt. If CCOM loads "too high" in upper memory, the hot keys may not work and NewDeal's driver may not be able to "see" CCOM.

The Complete PC also confirms that if you use STEALTH, and have High RAM Mapped (ST:M) or framed (ST:F) out, if any part of the main CCBACK code gets mapped, you will get a "resident code not found" error. This can affect CCOM in your NewDeal software and CFAX from DOS. If a call comes in, The Complete Communicator will still answer and take a fax or message, but you can't access it from the keyboard. You can get your messages from the local phone, but not a fax. It's still there, but you'd have to load CCBACK low or change your AUTOEXEC.BAT. CCBACK should be loaded as early in the AUTOEXEC.BAT and as low in the upper memory area as possible.

Also, you can load CCBACK with the /N flag, and then loadhi CFAXHKEY separately into another RAM area.

One customer's high RAM area looks like this

REGION AREA SIZE STATUS
1 B7EC - B7FE 0.2 USED (UMB)
2 D000 - D312 12K USED (QEMM)
2 D313 - E041 52K USED (SSTOR)
2 E043 - E195 5.4K USED (CCBACK)
2 E196 - F5CC 80K USED (CCBACK2)

If CCBACK was moved any higher into the RAM, it wouldn't run properly. QEMM's Optimize was not able to configure things this way automatically. The optimum result was only achieved through trial and error by hand.

CCOM_OFF

The program CCOM_OFF is supposed to unload The Complete Communicator's CCBACK fax software and thus free up about 100K of RAM. It appears to run successfully, but it may not free up any RAM if other TSR's were loaded after CCBACK was loaded.

If the TSR is Netware, CCOM_OFF will display an error message to this effect. If, however, it's something simpler like a mouse driver or the stub that NewDeal software leaves behind when you launch a DOS program, CCOM_OFF may appear to work, but may actually free up only a couple hundred bytes (that's bytes, not Kbytes).

Additional Tips

Editing Faxes

Any time you need to play with something you're faxing (putting different letterheads on the same page successively for multiple senders, etc.) and CFAX can't handle it, you can send the fax to a number that you know is disconnected or is not a fax line. The transmission won't go through, obviously, but the document files will be placed in the CFAX directory page by page. Each page can then be renamed individually in DOS (as long as you keep the 3-digit extension).

Scheduled Fax Not Sent

If you leave your NewDeal software running for several days and then try and send a fax via The Complete Communicator, it may not get sent until you exit to DOS (e.g. by clicking Manage Faxes to see why your fax isn't being sent). This is because NewDeal sets the ship time of the fax to be its current time, but due to the way DOS handles dates, the fax TSR may think the current time is actually several days earlier. When you exit your NewDeal software, the DOS date and time are restored to their correct values, the TSR realizes the fax is past-due, and sends it. This pertains to outgoing faxes only, not incoming.

INQUEUE File

The Complete Communicator fax software looks at the INQUEUE file to detect if faxes are waiting. If the software shows faxes waiting, but there really aren't any, then this file may be the problem. If the file INQUEUE.CFX is not zero-length, it will cause the software to think there's a fax. Running CFAX will usually cause a corrupt INQUEUE.CFX file to be deleted.

MS DOS 4

One customer has reported better performance while using The Complete Communicator under MS DOS 4 by setting FILES=110 in the CONFIG.SYS and SHARE /F:6144 in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file.
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Last Modified 17 Feb 1999