windows xp and modem noises

Hi gurus,

I just bought an Emachines PC for my mother in-law. Yes, I know they are low-end machines, and yes, I know most everything is integrated onto the motherboard... but hey, she only needs the thing for email and using quicken. It has Windows XP Home Edition on it. I have two problems that I am assuming are related. The first is that I cannot turn the modem speaker off when it's dialing into AOL. I went into the control panel into the Phone and Modems options and I turned the modem speaker setting to "off." Yet everytime she dials out you can hear it. I had never seen this before, but all the sounds that usually come out of the modem speaker, actually come out of the system speakers. Anyone know how I can turn this off? She hates to listen to the computer "talking" to the server it's dialing into.

Then today, I happened to turn on Windows Media Player to listen to a CD while I was trying to figure out how to turn the modem speaker off. It was then that I noticed that you can't dial out and connect to AOL while there is music playing over the speakers. I'm assuming the two are somehow getting crossed and the music is interfering with the modem being able to establish a connection. That's the error you get, "the modem was unable to establish a connection." Is this because the sound card is integrated into the motherboard? Anyone got any ideas? If nothing else, I can buy a cheap modem and disable the onboard modem. Or I can buy a cheap sound card and disable the onboard sound.

Thanks for your help.

 

I forgot to mention that the modem is an HSP56 MicroModem, and their tech support didn't seem very helpful. I sent them an email regarding this and they referred me back to emachines, when emachines referred me to them.

I found an AT command list on the tech support portion of pctel's website, so I think I'm going to try and turn the modem speaker off manually (screw Win XP!) and see if that cures my problem.