i just ventured into a new domain. i got rid of my old, slow, paper weight packard bell. and built my own. huge step. fortunatly i have some clue, but not enough tech knowledge. my pc is; an asus a7v600 mo board, w/ amd athlon 2200(2.2 gig) cpu, radien ati 8600se 128 mb video card, on board sound, cd burner,480 watt power supply, and an expandable tower. heres the kicker......i only have access to dial up! my modems box says 56k, i only see 1-3 kbs on my downloads! can this be right? ive tried speedup download programs. but i can only go with what is recomended by that program. my ignorance in thechnical application is very limited. trial and error has landed me into, reformat and reinstalling windows xp pro at least 7 times in the last 2 months, then reload all programs, research all the updates that ide gotten from the net with my slow (third) modem.my friends pc is so much older, yet so much faster with thier cable connections. its just not available 2 me yet.i need help!!!!!!!!