Lately, Ive noticed that these boards have been slow to load…
often I end up with a “page not found” or a “504 time out”.
Other sites take long to load as well.
When I first started surfin the net, my computer’s modem was running at 53000. Lately it runs 49333 or even 48000.
Is there a way to boost the modem speed without opening up the housing and adding hardware?
I often de-frag the hard drive and delete old emails.
Can you offer advice as to what commonly available applications interfere with AOL so I can delete them as well?
All I can say is that it’s not always your internet connection that is the problem when pages take a time to load. These boards also load slowly for me and I am on a cable modem which averages around 250k a second when downloading from any servers on a fast line. These boards seem to be very popular, so I awlays visit at odd hours of the night so that there is free bandwidth (it’s 5 a.m. right now).
Anyway, the same restrictions go for any other web sites you may visit (as well as any other internet services you may use). Basically what it comes down to is that you can be sitting on an oc3 (hella fast connection) and if the bandwidth on the server you are connecting to is just not very abundant, you are out of luck.
As for boosting the modem’s speed itself… not going to happen anytime soon (if at all) since analog dialup modems are already pushing their theoretical maximums. Thus the rise of DSL and cable modems rather than analog phone lines.
As for de-frags of the hard drive and deleting old emails… A def-rag of the hard drive will slightly increase overall performance of software and the OS in general if the drive was fragmented severely. It won’t have an affect on your modem’s performance, however, it just may have an affect of the performance of whatever software you are using (be it a web browser, ftp client, hotline client, etc).
Deleting old emails isn’t going to have any performance benefits besides saving a small amount of space on your hdd (which is going to be a VERY small amount of space unless you have some very very large attachments).
I’ve never used AOL before (even though technically my tw cable modem is owned by AOL), so I can’t help you on the last question.
Let me finish by suggesting that if you spend any significant amount of time on the internet that you consider dsl or a cable modem. If you’ve got the extra money to shell out for them they can be a dream come true. I often have dreams about my cable modem. I love her so much. 