First off I have a 2 year old Dell(1.6gh-80gb hard drive)that came with 256k memory. When we first got it it was very fast when we used the internet. The first thing that we did was to "get rid" of Internet Explorer and downloaded the Opera browser. It works much better. About 1.5 months ago our speed began to slow down. Was told to add memory and it should work much faster. So I doubled the memory and sure enough it worked much faster. Problem solved I thought. Now within the past week, back to the same old problem. This is where I think computers has a serious flaw. There always seems to be "something" wrong with it to slow it's performance. And after awhile it get's a little old. I'm not an expert on computers but it seems like you have to be to always "troubleshoot" yet another problem with them. It does,it get's very old after awhile. Right now I have dial-up. I know this is obsolete but I know the computer will work with it cause it has in the past even with our first computer 8 years ago. I checked and our isp does offer a web accelerator for an extran $2 a month. They have a 14 day trial and i'm going to try that and see if it helps. What confuses me is one day it works fine the next day it doesn't. I always delete things at the end of the day so my computer won't get full of unwanted stuff and also defrag when it need's to be done. So where do you think my basic problem is? My guess it's not my computer but i'm thinking that maybe the answer is a DSL line. I really would like your input on this. I would like to fix this myself because I also want to learn something. What's my first step? Thank You for your time. I do appreciate it. John

Just a follow up: It took 2:52 sec. for my post to be posted and the speed was 275 B/s. Also it kept telling me the request had been "Qued". Thought this info might help. Thanks.