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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Len who wrote (2312)	9/5/1998 12:39:00 PM
From: mr.mark	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

my system: dell dimension xps166, 64 mb ram, 3.2 gb hard drive, 17" monitor, 33.6 usrobotics modem, w/windows 95 os well, i installed a cable modem and ethernet card yesterday, and i'm very, very pleased with how quickly pages load for me. we're very fortunate to have cable modem here in the small northern california community i reside in. service costs total of $29.95 per month... $21.95 for the isp's premium plan and an additional $8.00 for the cable modem. they supplied all the hardware, including the external telephone modem. they are having a special where they waive the $99 installation fee and they'll come out and set everything up. (there was a 3 week waiting period for an appointment so i asked if i could pick the stuff up and hook it up myself... how else to learn, right?) i also paid $15 for isp setup fee and $25 refundable equipment deposit. imo, they're practically giving their service away... and in fact their manager has told me they just want numbers for now so that they can go into other communities with impressive stats. i still maintain dial up connections with 2 other isp's. i determined in listening to other traders that 3 isp's, all with different backbones, is a good way to go. the "downstream" difference is quite dramatic. first thing i did when i got the cm running was to clear all cache and load some of the webpages that are graphic-intensive and used to take 30-60 seconds to load. one is the los angeles dodgers home page (http://www.dodgers.com/dodgers97/centerframe.html). this site literally took me close to 1 minute to fully load. now 5 seconds with cm. another is our (choke) good friend james cramer's site, thestreet.com (http://www.thestreet.com/). this page used to fill in like 30 seconds, roughly. now, 3-4 seconds. here in SI, i can pretty much flip through pages like tv channels (almost!). and that's without reading the posts <GG>. i had a number of issues to resolve upon installing the ethernet card, including a conflict with my video card that was causing freezing, hanging, and this weird kind of wash-out look where i'd open, say, the control panel window and when i clicked to open the network window, instead of opening on top of the control panel window, it would display partially, allowing me to see through it to the window behind or underneath it. the effect was like looking through a skeleton. i took the ethernet card out and put it into another isa slot and at least my machine recognized the new hardware (it hadn't the first time), but the video weirdness was still present. i was able to re-install the latest video drivers from the dell site (with the help of a dell tech cause i'm still duh on a lot of this). i say re-install cause i downloaded new drivers 10 days ago but things still weren't stable. long story endless... the video prob cleared up! i guess the introduction of the ethernet card and cm into my system, and the subsequent video weirdness, was coincidental. i sense that i may be slipping ever so slowly into geekdom... signs of slippage? 1)well, i've bookmarked this thread and tend come here before the others. 2)my first venture inside the case awhile back was to install additional 32mb ram. 3)i went back in to install a scsi card for a jaz drive. 4)i was bound and determined to troubleshoot the cause of a rather massive memory leak, and eventually pinpointed ie3.0 as the culprit. netscape navigator 3.0 gives me no such system resource drain, and after the fact i found a microsoft bulletin announcing the ie3.0 mem leak. 5)this most recent trip back inside the case with the ethernet card, and the cable modem configuration. 6) all the damn pc world and computer shopper articles i find myself reading instead of watching television! anyway, i've rambled unforgivably. i just wanted to share my excitement with the cable modem, and to solicit any feedback re load time on the 2 sites i enclosed. thought it might be informative? thank you for being patient with me <G>.