Hello Lennart, Thanks for your message. My comments are inline below. Steve ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lennart Sorensen" <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> To: "Steve Petrie, P.Eng." <apetrie@aspetrie.net>; "GTALUG Talk" <talk@gtalug.org> Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2016 3:40 PM Subject: Re: [GTALUG] GTALUG - BUILDING DEBIAN 8 PC TO REPLACE WIN XP PC
On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 01:50:00PM -0400, Steve Petrie, P.Eng. via talk wrote:
Mainly because I use dial-upon the Win XP system, and I don't want the hassle of changing it to use DSL, before I get the new Linux PC. Also, I'm curious to see if the experience with dial-up is better on Linux than on Win XP.
I can't imagine anything that would make it better on Linux. Web pages are simply not designed with low bandwidth in mind these days.
I agree that dial-up is painfully slow loading many web pages. My experience used to be that web pages loaded slowly over dial-up. But they always used to load successfully. Over the years there's been a gradual degradation in page load reliability until today, when far too many pages just fail to load completely on the first attempt and I have to retry the load. My ISP (understandably) is not interested in finding out the cause of these problems.
I do plan, after the Linux PC is operational, to switch to DSL.
Well in that case, it would seem a waste to buy a modem that works with linux at all. If you already have one, that's different. Dialup modems are not that cheap these days due to lack of demand.
Here's the complication that motivates me to first, get a dial-up modem working on the new Linux PC, and then, switch the Internet link from dial-up to e.g. DSL. Right now, I run my Internet life (email, web browsing) on the Win XP PC using dial-up. If I switch to DSL before I set up the new Linux PC, then I'm going to have to update the Win XP PC to work with the DSL modem (e.g. seeing it as an Ethernet router). I really am not keen to mess around with changing the Windows XP PC to DSL from dial-up, when I'm planning to quit using the Win XP PC anyway. Maybe I'm just a Nervous Nellie, but I would rather try first to get the Linux PC to work with a dial-up modem, so I can continue to use dial-up on the Windows XP PC for my live production email operations. Once I have switched to using the new Linux PC for email and web browsing via dial-up modem, then I can comfortably upgrade my telco twisted copper pair from dial-up to DSL, and I only have to cope with getting the new Linux PC to work with DSL. And never bother to switch the Win XP PC over to use DSL.
-- Len Sorensen