I got myself a Zoom External 56k modem. When i first connected to the internet i noticed that the speed that pages loaded at were wildly varying, going from 2.5kb/s down to about 250 b/s.
This performance degraded steadily until i could connect "to the network" but not actually receive any data at all.
So i switched to root and tried again. Everything was back to 2-3Kb/s. Switching back to my user account things were a little slow but not too bad.

This raises some obvious questions.....

under Windows the speed of the modem reads as 115,200 (approx) yet the slider on the device tab in KPPP is set to 57600. Is this, a)normal, b) changeable ? ( i know the slider can be moved, but will it damage the modem?)

Are these overall speeds the kind of performance i can expect ?

Any help would be most appreciated.

If it helps, the last thing i installed was Opera.

First off, the 115 000 setting in windows is the maximum speed of the port. Not the modem itself. Modem (dial-up that is) are limited to around 56 000. This is due to telephone switch configuration. (By the way, there is no way this could damage your modem)

Second take a look at this post:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=36067

Hope this help

i did actually find that sorting out the DMA settings seemed to yield a better modem performance.
I do'nt understand this except maybe that the modem was downloading it faster than it could be read off the disk.
THis seems unlikely but, once the DMA problems were sorted the modem got better too.
Netscape 7 seems to be able to cope with whatever the net throws at it and surfing is now easily comparable to surfing with MS expect i don't have to be watched by my OS anymore.