Not sure if this just isn't an excuse to post from Linux. Finally got the modem straightened out and the cookie issues, so now I can.

But it's really slow. Anyone know what factors go into surfing speed? There's the modem, obviously, but that's as fast as the Celeron's internal. There's the 16550A UART (do I have that right?) which is... eh. And there's the COM port speed - 9600 baud. Ugh? And then does my hard drive, processor - video even - relate not so much to bandwidth, obviously - but the speed at which the comp can render what it downloads? And then the browser which is, ironically, Opera.

I ran hdparm a bit and it was already -c3, but I added -m16 -u1 -W1, and got a 'not allowed' for DMA - I think my drive is so old, it's unsupported. Still, some changes and yet no change to the -tT output. That strikes me as really weird. No better; no worse. De nada. The disk *is* slow.

Basically, like many of my problems, there's a billion things I know to do but not which or exactly how, and a billion things I don't know to do, I'm sure.

Lynx is reasonably fast - way faster than Opera - and I like it except for one main thing - visited links don't change colors and, as far as I can tell, I can't change it to make it do so. But that's software-related. Still would love a link-changing console browser.

If all else fails, is there a good guide, not for a 'this' or 'that' HOWTO, but a 'the whole process' HOWTO? That tracks the relevant points of the hardware and software involved in determining the speed of connection?

Um, maybe this part should be a separate thread, but I don't like to start too many of those - I have a Compaq V75 monitor and a S3 Trio 64 card, with a meg of memory - set to 800x600, 8-bit. But every now and then, in Linux, the monitor blinks on and off, which it never does in WfW. Are Vector and I about to blow another monitor or does this sound more like a power management setting issue or something else? (Not a laptop, but Linux does like to turn off monitors.)

'evening all!

Firstly, 9600 baud is mega slow, 16550s are capable of 115,200 baud. These numbers are basically the speed (in bps) at which the RS232 port works at. In other words you are being slowed down if your baud rate is lower than your modem speed.

A slow hard drive will slow down caching operations and using swap space if you need to.

Rendering speed depends mainly on processor speed and available RAM.

Your video card shouldn't slow your surfing down much at all, my monitor blinks only when the video mode (resolution / refresh ) are being changed, so your problem could be power management...

-Taiyo

Thanks - I'll look into the power management angles. Doesn't seem to do it in console, though, come to think of it - as well as not in the other system... so it may be X-related after all.

Maybe I'm messed up here. Some diagnostic or another reported both ports as 16550A - the first com port as 9600 and the second as 2400, while my modem is a "56K' modem (on /dev/ttyS0 or COM1), but yeah, my pppscript uses the value of 115200 and I seem to only get a few errors or dropped packets or whatnot. Though that may have more to do with MRU values - I tried to do some research on MRUs and adjusting the numbers but got kind of lost. So whatever that means - I get confused by all the differing numbers... 'if you have a foo modem, it will need a value higher than foo.' Well, why not call it a 115200 modem then? 'If you have a 115200 modem, set it to 115200.' So I'm not sure if the 9600 number was relevant. All I know that's meaningful is loading an LQ page might take 1-3 seconds on the Celeron and something like 6-12 on the Pentium. On less intensive sites, Mozilla might be instant-a second and Opera might be 1-3. At lower levels, the difference is a lot more tolerable though I guess the ratio's the same. And Mozilla hangs slightly once in a great while, making it take several seconds to load a page, while Opera hangs frequently, making me just hit cancel and reload after 20-30 seconds.

Got a tiny amount of memory, just 32 megs and a 32 meg swap, but I never run out of memory. Incidentally, I maybe solved my console-browser problem by downloading w3m. Pretty sweet. Anyway, I was compiling it and surfing with Opera in the meantime and it seemed to go as well - or poorly - as ever. I'm not doing very intensive multi-tasking or anything, obviously. But for instance... don't laugh - the Celeron usually downloads a file a 4.1-4.4 K/sec and w3m was downloading at 2.1-2.3. Yeah, either's pathetic, but I'm used to the 4 thing.

Cool to know the video shouldn't slow me down too much - I suspect that's my weakest link, so if that's not a problem, that's good.

Thanks for taking the time.

digiot, Computer speed, memory, and hard drive speed will not effect the bandwidth of the internet. Either server, router, connection path, time of day, or communcation port will affect your internet connection. A 4 MHz processor can handle internet connections and with surprising results. When I started using the internet, I had an 80386 with 8 megabytes of memory. It took a long time to decompress the images but my downloading speeds was 5 kilobytes steady using an internal 56kbit winmodem from US Robotics.

Everybody is at mercy with internet.