-=> CHARLES ANGELICH wrote to WAYNE CHIRNSIDE <=-

 WC> I was over to my landlady's house the other day and there in
 WC> all it's splendor stood a GHz Hewlett Packard with gobs of
 WC> memory a huge hard drive, cable modem and every imaginable
 WC> gadget and gizmo attached. So I sit down expecting a
 WC> wonderous and fast net experience and what do I find? The
 WC> blasted computer running Win XP at a GHz with cable modem
 WC> is three times slower than my 66 Mhz 486 running Windows
 WC> 3.1 and a 28,800 dialup!!!

 CA> My daughter has XP on a cable modem and I would say it's not a
 CA> great deal faster than my setup at home on a Pentium 5 at 60mhz
 CA> using W31 browsers - most of the time. FTP is something like 10
 CA> times faster (or more) though. I've not used it enough to have
 CA> exact numbers but it's not as good as I expected it to be.

 I was attempting to load www.gist.com hardly a slow
 page but I left the computer in disgust before it ever
 loaded.
 
 CA> Once you have the newer hardware and software you're forced to
 CA> accept the 'alternate' page with all the bloat which, as you
 CA> have said, would make you wonder what you had gotten for the
 CA> money.

I'm certain FTP would have been fast but I was just trying to surf
and that was impossibly slow.
Getting to FTP would be another matter entirely.
It was obvious the slowup wasn't in the net connection but
the incredibly sleepy Win XP.
What an incredibly pretty picture the monitor presented
but ask the damned thing to _DO_ anything and you'd best
be prepared to take a nap :-(
The landlady told me it took a long time to boot but I didn't
attempt that as I don't expect to live long enough 
to see that through to the finish.
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