Setting up a PC Fax

[SharkAttack]

This is a very blank question as I don't have the specs in front of me.

Friend has a dell pc with Windows Xp. He has a lexmark all in one printer, and one of the features is a fax.

Now can he set it up as a fax so that he can either send a document from the pc directly OR just use it as astand alone fax with the pc switched off, or does it have to be one or the other?

If going through the pc, does the printer need to be plugged directly into the phoneline or can you go via the pc and back?

Can you fax without a fax machine?

And so on.

[vertigo]

From my own experience and from the experience of my g/f's family on a different occasion, fax software on Windows is more hassle than it's worth.

For one, they had a problem where they couldn't receive a fax when their computer was connected via broadband, it simply refused to receive the call when the phone rang. Then the software (WinFax) started causing major system bugs, slowing things down, eventually crashing, interfering with MS Office, etc and it had to be removed.

In my case I could happily send faxes, which came out great quality because I wasn't scanning them with a crappy fax machine at my end, I was sending them directly from Word, but I couldn't receive them no matter what I did.

Basically, from my experience, fax on a pc is a massive pain in the arse, though someone else must have had more luck or the software wouldn't exist in the first place.