I just realized that one of the most important things that you can get or do to speed up you ability to access sites, download, etc., is to get as much memory as your PC will hold. Everything that we do takes up memory, even running windows, exployer, etc. If you don't have enough then your PC is constantly writing things to your hard disk and then having to reload them when you do someting different. This is called virtual memory which is really a bad name as it is not memory at all. Thus if your PC is runnig slow it might be simply because you don't have enough memory for what you want to do and your PC is constantly reading and writing to your hard disk which will really slow it down.
Befor I went to DSL I used a 56k modem and I still accessed this site without any major problems but then again I had over 2 megs of memory.
Bill