I have seen several places and many people say that if you set your dial up modem's port speed to 115,200 it makes it run faster, this really is not true. In the United States the FCC limits all dialup connections to a 53kbps connection speed...that is the most you can get here. setting the port speed of the modem that high does not help, it does hurt a little. the port speed being set that high reserves system resources for something that will never be. 57600 is the speed you want, the modem will be more stable because it's set to a speed close to the actual numbers you can get. no one with a 56k modem will be able to get more then 56k, unless they modify the hardware.
with xp pro,...you can use gpedit.msc and remove the reserve bandwidth and actually get a little boost. also setting the outstanding packets to 45535 instead of it's default 65535 helps a great deal with dialup.some script programs may help a little, but not enough to justify having one...i need to look up how to set the same options on the home edition...i usually only set it on pro because it is handy on it,...wil post it when i find it unless someone wants to help me out. i dont want to post wrong information so i will have to test it too.
to set the options on pro go to
Start>run>type
gpedit.msc
click ok, now under local computer policy expand network, then highlight QoS Packet Scheduler. in the main window to the right you should now see limit reserve bandwidth, right click on it, select properties and set it to enabled then change the value of 20 to 0. then right click limit outstanding packets and select properties and enable it, change the 6 to a 4 and apply.(45535 should be your number)

I did not find a way to make the change on XP home, ...I seen it in the reg...but i dont post reg edit tips....
I did find a link with several speed tweaks that work...enjoy
http://cable-dsl.home.att.net/#IncreasingWindow
Covers about everything.