DSL vs Dial-up Woes

[Ken Salisbury]

Saturday I was unable to sync my DSL modem to with my ISP.

After and on-line chat with a Mindspring tech. I called and got a real live perrson on the phone. She walked me through a process of verify all of my settings, etc associated with my DSL. Her conclsion was either a faulty modem of a telephone company problem. She transferred me to the repair folks who had the phone company verify their line. After which (5 hours later) the phone company said the line was fine. --- so Earthlink is shipping a new modem which I am suppose to receive on Wednsday.

I am on my 4th day of having to resort to dial-up --- and what a bummer, especially when trying to accomlish my chores as a moderator. It takes forever (at least it seems) to download a long thread.

Sometimes we don't know how well off we are with what we have.

[Karl Laustrup]

I know what your talking about Ken. I have cable and download at 3Megs. My golf buddy has dial up cause that's all he can get. The bummer is he can't even download at 56k, he only goes to 28.8k on a good day. I feel like I can do half a project in the time it takes to download something on his 'puter. The phone company won't even come out to check out their connections.

I had the same problem before cable was available in my area. Then cable and DSL became available at the same time. I told the phone company to stuff it as they wouldn't help me get to 56k when I was downloading at 28.8k. Couldn't be happier with the Charter Cable service I have.

Karl

[Joe Mioux]

Lets put this into perspective

I often have to think back to the '80's when I had to download magazine stories for our association's magazine. I thought I was cruising at 1200 baud rate . Some of the free lancers only had 300 baud modems which meant I could read the story as it downloaded. .

Today, I have DSL, which replaced my "slow" wireless 385K speed, which replaced my "sloooooower" 56K modem, which replaced my slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooweeeeeeeeeerrrrrrr 28.8k modem. But nothing brings a smile to my face as much as those "ancient" times when I was trying to figure out how to connect my computer to the other guy's computer to download those stories at 1200 baud or 300 baud.

Joe

[Gary Max]

Heck we have a extenison cord a 1/2 mile long from the last real phone line up the road.
The phone company says if your phone rings that's good enough for them.

[Jim Becker]

Yea, that isn't a happy thing, Ken...I know how you feel as every once in awhile I get stuck in a hotel property that doesn't have some form of high speed access and it drives me batty since I pretty much "live" online!

Joe M...I remember selling 300 baud modems (for a LOT of money) when I ran a Radio Shack store back in the 1980s...and now I'm anxiously awaiting Verizon's FIOS (fiber to the prem) that should be here where I live before the end of the year...15mb down/2mb up for under $50 a month. My phone service will also be on the fiber and as soon as it's approved by "whomever", my TV service will be on the same fiber, too...for less money than Comcast.

[Don Henthorn Smithville, TX]

I sympathize with you, Ken. I recently had to invest in a different computer and reinstall many programs. The last program I installed was Partition Magic 8.0. The problem is that when I click on the documentation link, it loads Photo Elements 2 and the Partition Magic pdf pages come up on a small screen on the Photo Elements home page. Things like this drive me buggy.

[Jim Becker]

Don, install (or reinstall) Adobe Acrobat Reader and then bring up Windows Explorer (not IE) and access Tools --> Folder Options --> File Types and the scroll down to .pdf. Change the application association from Elements back to Adobe Acrobat Reader if it was not corrected by installing/reinstalling Acrobat. When you installed Elements, that file type was accidentally registered for the new application or Acrobat was not already installed and the assumption was made that Elements should handle it.

[Joe Mioux]

Yea, that isn't a happy thing, Ken...I know how you feel as every once in awhile I get stuck in a hotel property that doesn't have some form of high speed access and it drives me batty since I pretty much "live" online!

Joe M...I remember selling 300 baud modems (for a LOT of money) when I ran a Radio Shack store back in the 1980s...and now I'm anxiously awaiting Verizon's FIOS (fiber to the prem) that should be here where I live before the end of the year...15mb down/2mb up for under $50 a month. My phone service will also be on the fiber and as soon as it's approved by "whomever", my TV service will be on the same fiber, too...for less money than Comcast.

ZOOM zoom zoom ZOOM,

Hey Jim remember those RS model100 "laptops"?