this new broadband thing is a double edged sword. My connection is only one meg speed which I expect is the new dial-up but it seems perfectly adequate for me. The downside is a modem that switches off before windows is booted so when you try to connect, windows says the modem is not found. Apparently this can be fixed by updating USB drivers (woosh, over my head) and tweaking the BIOS (could risk that maybe). Also when connecting, it gets stuck on "verifying username and password" which according to the support peopple in India requires the TCP/IP stack to occasionally be reset, which I've actually learned to do (so this has been an educational experience) though I'm not sure you should have to do it every single day. I've downloaded a little prog which does all the command line stuff for you, but I suspect it still requires a restart afterwards which then means it's touch and go whether the modem will stay on or go back to sleep when you need it - grrrr! I didn't even blog about the installation instructions which were via a nice flash wizard but didn't actually do the job, which also required several phonecalls to India. They seem to be extremely slow at reading out the instructions, as if they're hard to read - maybe they can't afford computers and they're actually printed on the side of a passing airship and they have to grab their binoculars and wait for it to float past the window again at each stage of the process - that's certainly how it seems when it takes twenty minutes for them to talk you through a process which you already tried (without success) and only took thirty seconds to do. At one stage the lady told me to take my computer to an engineer because the modem installation didn't work. When I asked her if we could try to do the installation manually she said casually "well yes, we could try that...." Gah! Fortunately I'm not a complete technophobe and do have same vague concept of what needs doing and how to do it. I feel sorry for the non-geeky types out there like my mother who would end up tearing out their hair.... (though luckily my brother does this stuff all day so she can phone London instead of Mumbai)

oh and thank goodness for bit torrent - I just hope I don't get into trouble for breaking the ISP rules on fair usage