14.4 Runs Faster Than 56k Modem. Why?

I only have a 14.4 modem for my dial up connection. It obviously runs
slow nowadays with all the junk they throw on the Internet. (for
straight text, it runs great).

I needed access to some information and went to a neighbor who has a
56k dial up. I went to the desired site and to my surprise, the site
loaded much slower than it does on my home machine. That didn't make
any sense to me.

I did suspect one thing: My browser is also old. I get Javascript
errors and tell it not to bother with that. Perhaps the heavy java
junk they send down today is bypassed since my browser won't support
it; further, my browser won't execute any of that java script (which
can slow things down quite a bit). I don't get the animations, but
who cares? I also miss out on a lot of ads.

In some ways the fancy java junk is helpful. But in many ways it is
nothing but a huge waste of bandwidth and PC CPU cycles. My high
powered work PC with a good connection pauses when it works on some
internet screens, which I think is utterly absurb and unnecessary.

(Part of my frustration is my feeling that PCs should not be disposed
of until they're physically worn out, which is about 5-10 years. But
with the rapid obsolesence of ALL the components (browsers, I/O ports,
operating systems, internal motherboard connections, appplications),
PCs become functionally unusable (obsolete) much earlier than their
physical decline. Buying a new PC is an expense, not only for the new
machine, but also for transferring files and appliations over and
learning the new hardware and software.)


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