Speed Up and Fix Up Your Dial-Up
- Speed Up and Fix Up Your Dial-Up
- Bring Me a New Brain, Igor!
- What You Need to Know to Perform Brain Surgery on Your Modem
- Don't Just Call Any Number (Choosing the Correct Dial-Up Number)
- It's Not Your Modem—It's Your Phone Line
- Testing, Testing—Is Your Phone Line Ready to Rumble?
- Tweaking Your System for Faster Speed
- Adding Extra Horsepower to Your Internet Connection
- Software That Makes Tweaking Easier
- Super Glue Two Modems Together with Bonding
- How Bonding Works
- Will Your ISP Approve?
- Upgrading Windows 95 for Multilink Support
- Setting Up a Multilink Connection on Your Computer
- "We Interrupt This Online Session..." (Getting Calls While You're Online)
- Grabbing Messages While You're Online
Speed Up and Fix Up Your Dial-Up
In This Chapter
How to keep your dial-up modem up-to-date
Checking your phone line
Adjusting your computer for maximum connection speed
Using two modems for a single connection
Taking and placing a phone call while you're online
Even if you're ready to make the leap into broadband Internet access, don't forget about your analog modem. Some forms of broadband are speedy in the download direction only, relying on your existing dial-up modem to send email and Web page requests. Even if you opt for a high-speed two-way service, you might face delays in getting the service installed. And, when you get broadband, your "ace in the hole" against inevitable system failures is your analog modem running as a backup.
So, don't discard that modem; instead, learn how to make it work better whenever you use it.
Old Modems Become New
As you learned in Chapter 2, your dial-up modem is the biggest single slowdown factor in how you experience the World Wide Web and the Internet. Because you're reading this book (and an extra thank you! if you bought it), I know you're drooling over getting a high-speed connection. So, why did I include this chapter?
As you'll discover in later chapters, some parts of the country offer you an overstuffed buffet table of high-speed choices, while others offer only promises of high-speed services to come. If you live in a part of the country where high-speed Internet is filed under science fiction—futuristic fantasy, you need this chapter.
You also need this chapter even if you're about to make the high-speed plunge. Unlike dial-up services such as AOL, Prodigy, or others which can be activated by installing the free trial CD-ROM that fell out of your cereal box this morning, all high-speed services require that new hardware (and sometimes new network cable) be installed. This can take time—sometimes a lot of time.
Finally, for those of you fortunate enough to already have high-speed service, I hope you kept your modem installed. If you did, you can always revert back to a dial-up Internet connection in case your normal service fails.
So, for all of you, here's how to keep your modem in tip-top shape until the broadband connection of your dreams arrives (or no longer is on the fritz).