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.

Yeah... the 56k is referring to kilobits.

More precisely it is referring to the maximum speed the modem can achieve, which is: 56 kilobits per second.

There are 8 bits in a byte. Therefore it is a simple operation to do 56/8 = 7kilobytes per second on your absolute best day. However, the thing they neglect to tell you: that is total possible throughput. It encompasses both downloading ("recieving") and uploading ("sending") data. So you will really only get a 3.5-4 kilobit per second transfer rate in either direction.

I hope you followed that. I tried not to make it too confusing... think of it like a speed limit. Cable modems and DSL are like the freeway, and 56k is like driving past a schoolyard full of kids. In one case you have the possibility of zipping around cyberspace... in the other you're relegated to crawling across your cyber-lawn to fetch email.

P.S. AMD Athlon XP 2200+'s run at 1.8GHz, but perform at least as well as Pentium 4 2.2GHz processors because they are far more efficient Good choice! Motherboard could have been a bit better though... next time I reccommend an Asus A7N8X or A7N8X-E (the E stands for deluxE apparently...)

Hello,

Just wanted to say that what your experiencing is totally normal! I have dial up to and it is very slow. Most of the time I just download files over night. Then in the morning they are done. Other wise it takes too long.

Later...

Whilst in theory dial-up modems work at 56k, according to technicians I've spoken to, in practice they only operate at about 30-35k. You're doing well to get 4-6 kb/s in LW. Occasionally you might get a bit better depending on traffic & source. Cable/Broadband are some other options if it really annoys you.