Olive
The COM port is severely limited in its bandwidth - while any
Pentium-II-class machine is quite capable of filling that bandwidth with no
impact on system speed, unless perhaps it also has to cope with compression
on-the-fly (which is better done within the modem, anyhow)
You would appear to be using Windows 98 - and applying Win3.1 tweaks to it.
Many of these tweaks don't work, simply because Windows changed
significantly between Win3.x and Win98, and the hooks for the tweaks to hang
on just don't exist. Many of those that still apparently work are not
supported, or can lead to system instability or data loss.

In response to 1)
This would appear to expose a weakness in your modem, rather than a problem
with the OS - in that the modem is relying on the OS to do compression. Have
you updated the drivers for the modem?

in response to 2) - again, the s3 video tweak would appear to expose a
hardware problem rather than an OS problem - again, a driver update would
seem to be a possible solution.
This is the first time I have ever heard of the ForceLazyOff - I'm trying
to get some information on its working in Win98

as to 3) - the author of EasyMTU says that it's designed for DUN 1.2 (on
Win95) - and may not work with higher versions. Since an updated Win98 has
version 1.4 as a minimum, I suspect that the program may have problems.


....and you've still given no details as to your hardware!
In view of my comments above - perhaps you had also better include the
driver versions in use for the relevant items.

--
Noel Paton (MS-MVP 2002-2006, Windows)

Nil Carborundum Illegitemi
http://www.crashfixpc.com/millsrpch.htm

http://tinyurl.com/6oztj

Please read http://dts-l.org/goodpost.htm on how to post messages to NG's
"Olive" wrote in message
...
Will report back. This NG gave me four things to work on. Thanks.

To Mr. Paton your arguments proceed from at least two false
assumptions: 1) The lion's share of computers use Microsoft's latest
and greatest technologies and 2) Computing principles change as fast
as computing technologies.
All I know is using the principles in this article sped up internet
speed of my Win98 system dramatically. The principles, paraphrased
from the article, must be done in order--1, 2 then 3:
1) Start with your data link layer and make it solid (eliminate com
port overrunns).
Enable FIFO.
Reduce rate setting your com port advertises to modem.
For example, set modem speed to 56K but set comm port to

38K. You have to change comm port speed within each
software program that uses internet. Otherwise
Microsoft article says you cannot make comm port change
change using Control Panel.
2) Next work on the PPP or SLIP layer.
Turn off the "speed-up" option on your S3-chip-based video
cards. If current video software does not allow you to
change speed-up mode then manually add a line to the
[display] section of system.ini saying bus-throttle=on.
Turn off write-back cache for all drives. Write-behind
caching for VCACHE is turned-off with a line in the [386enh]
section of system.ini that says ForceLazyOff=C
3) Next use EasyMTU to tune the MTU, MSS and RWIN for maximum speed.