My box is greyed out too, but I can still respond to threads by just typing there.

 

Jim, what if you disable adblock completely? Tools->Adblock Plus ->Options -> Unmark Adblock Enabled.

 

I'll give it a try when I get home tonight. thanks.

 

Yes that worked, but it took longer to load that IE did. I'm going to try and log out now, which would not work before, and then log back in and enable adblock again just to see what happens.

 

Yes it is working and it's much faster than IE, and I have the adblock working. Would not let me log out though. Thank you very much axelm. You might see me on a little more often at home now.

 

No problem, my pleasure.

 

Longer loading time can be lessened by upgrading the RAM (The difference was noticeable when I went from 256MB to 512MB, but not much change from 512MB to 1GB. I assumed that the outdated, slow 1.6GHz Pentium-4 could not handle the situation[8D]).

RAM specs have changed dramatically in the last few years, and finding the right RAM could be a challenge (like my PC2100 DDR SDRAM, Bus-Speed 266MHz, 200-PIN SODIMM whatever[8D]). I wanted to get them before they went extinct.


JPN

 

I'm actually running a farily new system that has 512M of RAM. Once I blocked the ads things got much faster. The biggest gain I see is when I go BACK and the screen comes right up whereas with IE it would take a long time to populate the screen even going back.

 

JPN, a 1.6 P4 with 1 gb is more than enough to run a browser properly. Five years ago that could have been a small company server running a database engine and a file server. The PC industry wants to make us think that we need a new computer every 2 years, but they just want to sell us things we don't need. IMO, only gamers need to change/upgrade their PCs frequently.

 

So now using this forum on dial-up is not that bad? How long does it take to reload this thread if you press CTRL-F5?

 

Axel, I absolutely agree that gamers are the ones who need top of the line everything; CPU, RAM, Video Card, Sound Card, Streaming Video all running simultaneously. I once did a simulation on a Dell's XPS option adding page, and a fully-loaded XPS exceeded $6,000[:-].

You are definitely my electronics mentor. BTW, do you find any difference between Pentium & AMD?


JPN

 

Two minutes exactly and I have a fairly fast connection at 41.3 kbps right now. I've seen that as low as 12.2 on occasions. When I hit refresh though it only took 30 seconds, and when I go back the screen just comes right up.

Took about 16 seconds to post this reply, which isn't bad at all.

 

Jim, well done on your browser improvement!! I may try out FireFox myself, as I have it in my PC as a back-up.


JPN

 

Try this: Edit/Preferences/Content/ Disable load images automatically. That should take it down to 5 seconds.

 

Jim, I had that same problem when I used dialup some years ago. One day I could not connect higher than 19200 I took my notebook beside the phone pole and connected there at 53K consistently. I called the phone company and they sent a guy that rewired the phone line inside the house. I remember it was not expensive at all.

Another option would be to get a separate phone line (i.e. separate wiring) to make sure that the wires are new and that there are no other devices injecting noise into the line.

 

My house is only five years old.

 

If you have too many phones connected to the line that will affect the connection quality.

Do you have unexpected line drops? If so you might have a wiring problem.

 

I highly doubt the problem is on my end because it's only certain times of the day when it's real slow. If I get on in the middle of the night I will get 44 kbps and right now (7:30 in the morning) I'm at 40. Earthlink claims everything is fine on their end too. I hardly ever have a line drop on my. I disconnect and reconnect often trying to get faster service though.

 

What kind of analog modem are you using? You could probably buy a used US Robotics Sportster 56K for pennies on eBay. Those were the best for noisy lines IIRC. Another option is to ask your ISP what modems they are using on their side and then get the same one. Sometimes different chipsets don't cooperate very well when they negotiate speed.

 

Your analog voice line is probably being digitalized somewhere down the road. Voice compression algorithms adapt to the amount of traffic to stuff more users in the same bandwidth. To do that they distort the signal. An analogy would be mp3 compression. It sounds just like the original song, but it isnĀ“t.