Modem Accelerators
 

Anyone tried these? I'm running 98 SE on a laptop with an external 56K modem. There are quite a few to choose from however I've read some adverse comments on modem boosters via my search engine. Do I or don't I? The reason I'm posting this is that one of the negative comments I read involved some poor fellow spending hours trying to uninstall the thing! Thanks in advance for any thoughts offered.

I have used Net Accelerator, and seemed to get reasonable results, it starts to download the next page or links while your reading the current page.
Its about £20, but you can get 30 day eval copies.
Never tried to uninstall it so cant comment
Its worth an evaluation of a couple to see if it would work for you

Benefits of accelerators are dubious at best, but they are reknown for hiding "spyware" on your PC. This reports back your surfing habits to (among other places) marketing companies. Pop into grc.com for advice/details/info.

Download managers on the other hand can be very useful, especially if you have a connection that breaks halfway through a large download :mad:

98se is optimised for the Local Area Network, but it can be "adjusted" for better performance for Modems.

See; http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/30/

But only carry it out if you are confident about what you are doing! (and back up the regestry first)

Might be just me, but I've tried twice to use one called Netoptimiser and both times (the second time was with the latest version) I had to re-format my drive. :mad:

Never again!

There is actually not much which these progs do. One major "acceleration" is the internal database of translated "Favorites" web addresses in the numerical way.
Now that has caused plenty of trouble here with PPRuNe already....Senior management of a web site change the server, the www.xxxx stays the same but....the "real" address of the server has changed and until the next update of the accelerator, the website will never be found because it does not look for www.xxxx....instead, it looks for the stored http://202.198.011.001 or whatever the real address was.
The reason behind this feature is simple. When a browser tries to access a site, first the "translation" server is asked for the real address. Once this address is obtained the browser uses the translated address to access the site.
The accelerator simply does this work once (and at the set intervals it updates the obtained data) and this way one or two seconds are saved each time browsing a site.