If the reason for staying with dialup was the price, then there are some companies working hard to make dialup as painless as possible. Earthlink has a system for reducing download time by dealing with all of the images that load. You want the fastest download, then you look at a smudged version of the images. You can change the settings to get the best looking images, but when my DSL was on the fritz, I tried this and was pleasantly surprised with the results.

DSL is good for a lot of reasons suggested above, and it frees up your phone for regular phone business. I remember giving Don Firth a list of things to do when he was doing his DSL thing--I hope some of it came in handy, Don!

I'm going to be tweaking my wireless setup soon. Before the burglary (when all of the equipment hastily exited the house, never to be heard from again) I had an easy open network that the kids used, but anyone out in the street could also use. With the new setup I use a password on the router and now they have to log in each time they want to use the internet, after they power up their machine. This may be due partly to their wireless card being turned off when we turn off the power to the computer--if it stayed on, maybe it would always be connected? John, when you talk about letting XP run the network, are you saying that XP would do the same thing as the router software? I need to tell my router or XP or something to automatically let that other computer always have access, but block everyone else. Should I be simply telling XP or the router who can use it and drop the password, or stick with the password and find a way for it to stay in that wireless card's setup?

SRS