A960, no dial tone

You cannot use the Internet phone line for fax. It must be connected to plain old fashioned telephone service jack. If you have dropped your telephone land line, you will have to look for an Internet faxing service. Also you should know that Vista Home Premium does not have a fax utility. Only Enterprise and Ultimate can use fax.

4th try

Hi Mary,

Thanks for the input.

By Dell's information you can use a VoIP line. I got the tip to reduce the baud to 9600 straight from a Dell tutorial that showed how to use the machine on VoIP. Bear in mind that we do not have a digital line. That is different (offices and such). Once it goes through the converter it is a regular analog line. Our regular phones work on it. It is a dedicated fax line straight from Vonage (our regular phones work on it if need be).

This dedicated Vonage line has worked fine for fax service . It operated the last two printers we had (one HP, the other, Epson). If this specific machine cannot work on a line that two ancient faxes worked on, that's a bad endorsement of Dell's equipment.

The lack of fax utility is another reason I don't use Vista. I'm on XP Pro. Not that it matters; the computer doesn't even enter the equation for stand-alone faxing.

hotrodsurplus

Some phone companies offer an option called Distinctive Ring. This feature provides a different ring tone for each line, allowing someone who has one phone connected to multiple phone lines to determine which line a call is coming in by the distinctive ring. For example, if someone has a voice line and a fax line, the phone might give a standard single ring when someone is calling on the voice line, but would give two rings when a fax is coming in. To properly handle Distinctive Ring, the printer must be configured to know which ring to pick up on. For testing purposes, set the printer to pick up on any type of ring.

To set Distinctive Ring, perform the following steps:

Press the Options button twenty-one times until Ring Pattern is displayed.

Press the right arrow button until Any is displayed.

Press the Select button.

Thanks for the help, Jimmy. The problem that I'm having is that the machine won't hear a dial tone. For example, if I go to send a fax, I get no sound through the machine. Once it times out it'll wait a few minutes and try again. There is no dial tone present when the fax tries to dial.

Since the machine is on its own line it doesn't need any distinctive ring. In fact, it picks up almost immediately since we don't have any phones on that dedicated fax line.

I noticed this post and am having the same problem. I do not see any resolution mentioned here. Did you ever get this problem fixed? I have an A962 and have had the fax working before, but cannot figure out what we did to disable it. Can you help? PLEASE?

Thanks in advance!

jimnsue,

I know a Jim & Sue in AZ.

Start, all programs, Dell Printers, Dell Photo AIO Printer 962, Printer Setup Utility. The settings are there to disable the printer from answering the phone line.

Rick

Hi Rick -

Not AZ, am in Austin, TX.

Want to thank you for responding so quickly to me, but I did figure out my problem. This is embarrassing, but if it helps anyone out there, it is worth putting it out there. After 6 hours of uninstalling, installing, downloading, etc, I finally realized I had the phone cord from the wall plugged into the WRONG input on the back of the printer - all fixed! DUH!

Thanks again for your quick response!

Sue

Sue,

Gald you got it working. Please remember to mark Verify answer on your post so if others search these forums, they'll see what you did to get things working.

Just a note...

My friends real name is Glenda Sue and she very devilish. :emotion-14: Her husbands name is Jim.

Take care.

Rick

Hi Rick -

so new at this. Where do I "mark Verify" on my posts? Can I go back and mark the ones I have already posted?

Thanks!!

Sue