How To Speed Up Your Dial up Connection

Do you remember the days? Firing up your 200Mhz turbo PowerPC, dialling up using your 56k modem, waiting an age for your hotmail page to show up, waiting some more to check your e-mails only to have your connection die just as you hit the send button! How times change.

It's funny, once you've used broadband you quickly forget how painful the dial up connection was. I used to run my business on dial up and looking back I managed rather well. But these days there's no way I could do without my broadband connection.

There's no doubt about it, broadband is well and truly here to stay. It is of course a logical progression - streaming audio and video demand much higher bandwidth and broadband connections are the only way to achieve anything which is at all usable.

A recent survey revealed that 53% of Americans who use the Internet now use a broadband connection. What they failed to point out is that obviously this means 47% still use a dial up connection. This actually equates to around 60 million people. These kind of statistics are mirrored in other developed countries. When you consider a large chunk of the developing world still uses dial up then you realize that's an awful lot of people still using a slow Internet connection.

So is it possible to speed up your dial up connection?

Well actually yes it is. There are quite a few services online these days allowing you to "accelerate" your dial up connection. These Internet accelerators claim to be able to boost the speed of your dial up connection by as much as six or seven times.

Before you scream with delight at this prospect I feel I should point out right now that these accelerator services are not high speed broadband Internet services. They use a different kind of technology based on the same idea as things like zip files and mp3 files. These files use a compression algorithm to dramatically reduce the file size.

Internet accelerators work in the same way and most providers have also implemented a caching technology whereby they store local copies of popular web sites. These local copies are pre compressed and can be sent to the user very quickly. The user has a piece of software sitting on their PC which decompresses the data as it comes in. This is how the dramatic speed increases are achieved.

Many people report excellent success with these systems. Some people are even comparing the accelerators with broadband services

So while this is a really good thing for basic web pages, the technology falls down as soon as you start working with large video or audio files etc. Since an mp3 file is already compressed there's not much more compression that can be done and so the Internet accelerator has little effect. Plus many services have a file size limit meaning they will not even attempt to compress anything as big as a regular pop music mp3 file.

But if you're just loading up normal web pages without too much flash animation and all the other bells and whistles, then I highly recommend you get yourself an accelerated service. If your ISP doesn't offer it there are plenty that do so vote with your feet and check out some of these excellent services.

For more information simply search Google or Yahoo! for the term "dial up accelerator" or something like "speed up my dial up connection". You'll find lots of providers ready to supply you with service.

Some popular services in the USA are NetZero and Earthlink. In the UK you want to be taking a look at someone like Mistral or Onspeed.com

Fabio writes for many niches and is an experienced researcher. He has written articles covering a wide range of subjects and enjoys plying his trade especially on the Internet. He is currently sponsoring Ambient Modem News and Blogs and can be reached on fabio@linkz-and.info

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Education Key in Slowing Laptop Theft

Corporations spend billions of dollars each year repeating the same message over and over. It's called advertising and it works. A similar approach, according to a recent Processor story, stands the best chance of slowing the never ending tide of stolen laptops: Keep telling employees that they have to guard their machines, and keep telling them how to do it.

Security, of course, is not at the forefront of every employee's mind. Indeed, people take dumb chances. They leave machines unattended when they go to the rest room in a public venue. They leave them lying on the front seat of an unlocked car when they run into a store. The theme of the Processor piece is that continually drilling best practices and corporate policies into the heads of employees may gradually mitigate this behavior. It's important because the problem is so big: The Safeware Insurance Agency reports that more than 600,000 machines are stolen annually. About $5.4 billion in proprietary information is lost, and 97 percent of the purloined machines are lost forever.

The story also provides advice on issues tangentially related to stopping theft, such as the importance of management systems to track machines and the use of strong passwords and other strategies to thwart criminals when they do succeed in stealing the machines.

The problem of companies not even knowing if a machine is lost or stolen goes hand-in-hand with theft prevention. The centerpiece of a recent Canadian Technology News story is a study by Absolute Software that spotlights some disturbing malfeasance by respondents: 62 percent say that missing computers aren't even noticed and another 20 percent say that nothing is done about breaches.

Innovative tools are available, however. The bulk of the piece describes how Absolute Software tracks, manages and recovers wayward computers. The story provides a common-sense rationale for use of such software: Regardless of the impact it has on outside criminals, it is certain to chill internal theft simply because employees will know that it is there.

This PC World story reports on a product that is available in the UK. It is a modern-day equivalent of the prologue from the old Mission: Impossible television show, in which the tape detailing the ridiculous assignment Jim and the gang will pull off in 60 minutes (minus commercials) starts burning seconds after delivery its message. In this case, Virtuity's BackStopp will wipe data off hard disks if the machine is taken from an unauthorized area. The surveillance is done via the Internet, Wi-Fi or Global System for Mobile communication or radio frequency identification if the laptop is turned off.

The story adds that if a machine has a Webcam, it can be instructed to take a picture of the presumptive thief and transmit it to the central office. The data destruction procedures, which meet standards set by the U.S. Department of Defense's National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual, occur without alerting the thief.

A somewhat similar initiative, this one in India, is Locate Laptop from Unistal Systems. The software reports its location whenever it logs on. Thus, the owner or his or her company visit a Web portal to get a fix on a stolen machine. The IT Nerd provides a lot of useful links: iAlertU, Laptop Alarm, Lojack For Laptops and, for physically securing a laptop, Kensington Cable. The writer concludes that the best way to stop laptop theft is cutting down the amount of time the machine is left unattended.

There is good news and bad news in all this. The good news is that there is a lot of technology aimed at securing, managing, finding and, when necessary, disabling laptops. The bad news is that there are many people stealing laptops - and many corporate workers who are not paying attention.

Laptop thefts are costly. Read about the cost of Nashville laptop thefts: http://www.itbusinessedge.com/item/?ci=37828

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