annnnnnd noooooow tooooo leeeaaaaarn the meeeannning of slooooooow....

[icarus]

Wow. Our dial-up service is reaching epic dimensions of slow. It's taking upwards of a minute to load a web-page.

Hello, experts of the universe! (And you too!)

Do you have any recommendations for ISPs?

Earthlink was a customer service SNAFU and we can't get sbcglobal.net in Seattle. The local phone company charges an arm and a leg for DSL. I'm not able to pay more than twenty bucks a month for internet service, and reasonable speed dial-up is okay with me.

Will we get screwed if we go with something like netzero.com or pcpeople.com?

Right now we're using NoCharge.com and the dial-up provided by the university, but they've both suddenly bogged down. In all likelihood part of the problem is spyware (Ad-Aware isn't working *kicks it*) but... it was slow before, too.

Help?

Comments

[ursula]

Hmmm. You could try other browsers-- Firefox is supposed to take up fewer resources than Mozilla, and you might also look into Opera-- and you might also look at how many programs are set to run at startup and turn off as many as possible. (Windows setups usually have all kinds of junk running in the background.)

But it sounds like what you really need is a new system, or at least a newer system. If your acquaintance runs to computer geeks, you could probably get somebody's old computer for a smile and a cup of coffee, but then if that were true you probably wouldn't be asking livejournal . . . UW surplus has systems for next-to-free, but you don't know what's wrong with them until you set them up, and I'm guessing you aren't interested in that sort of deal (I'm not, but I live with a guy who installs Linux on webplayers for fun, so I know such people exist!) glasseye recommends RE-PC, a local company that refurbishes and recycles old computers; he says that when he was working for the school district, they had refurbished and perfectly functional iMacs for prices on the order of $100, and they have repair/ warranty options available. Their website isn't very forthcoming about full systems, though, so you'd probably have to make a phone call.