Over half of all households that connect to the Internet have a broadband connection these days, mostly cable or DSL. Which means the other half does not and still uses dial-up. Modems are much faster than they used to be in the early days of computing, but today’s websites are larger and require a lot of bandwidth to load quickly. To make matters worse for those on slower connections, even simple software updates are now often dozens of megabytes and can take a long time to download. What it all means is that modem users need a break!
Fortunately, there are things that can be done to make a connection faster. You see, the operating system software on today’s computers is not optimized for fast downloads. Microsoft’s primary goal is simply to make sure Windows works with all the different hardware out there. Compatibility is important, of course, but it can be frustrating when things just don’t work as well as they should.
But not everything is your computer’s fault. Your Internet service provider, too, is primarily concerned with reliability (good), compatibility (good), and moving as much traffic as possible with as little...