Once you know the speed of the modem, you can set your communications program to the appropriate speed. For the sake of simplicity, a detailed analysis of reasoning is provided in the Miscellaneous section of the Modem page. Set your communication speed to exactly the speed of your modem. If you are unsure, try using 19,200. If you would like to find the maximum speed experimentally, refer to the Miscellaneous section.
All modems support some kind of flow control.
It is almost always better to set a modem to hardware flow control. If your modem came with a cable, then it is most likely a hardware handshaking cable. If the cable is especially old, has never been used with a high speed modem or is you are experiences inexplicable problems, you may need to check your cable. You will be setting the DCE rate in you communcations program. Assuming some data is compressable, it needs to arrive at the modem at a faster rate then the modem can transmit.