i have recenly gotten a little more fluent in pc stuff. i had an old slow packard bell. very dissattisfied. a friend gave me some hints on saving some $$$, by building my own. did it. i have an asus a7v600 mo. board, amd athlon 2200 cpu (2.2gig), 80 gig maxtor h drive, 480 watt power source,radeon ati 8600se 128mb video card, on board sound(not a priority), and a sony cd-r/ rw cd burner. all sounds good, right? well, better then average. heres the kicker, i only have access to dial up!! now i am not fluent in kb's. i know my girl friends pc is slower then mine. but she has cable access, i download on hers in a snap! i think lime wire is the best thing since sliced bread! but my modem( third one i've gotten) says 56k. i am downloading on lime wire between 1 an3 kb/s. can that be right? i even tried a download booster. i dont see no difference. im not even sure what i can do to increase the speed using these speedup programs. i dont know the values that i should use. ignorrance sucks. i dont want to venture a guess on a number i know nothing about. my operating system is windows xp pro. lets just say that ive experimented with other changes before.............. reformat and reinstall windows....at least 7 times in the last 2 months. tired of doin that.gotta fess up. i need some help.