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General discussion

Dialup Internet, once tollerable, has slowed to a crawl

Oct 8, 2013 5:37PM PDT

Until a few years ago, dialup access was tollerable in speed. Since then it has slowed to a crawl on any PC I've used that requires it to get online. Sure, I know there's all the graphics sites use to be cool and flashy to slow things down.

However, that's not nearly the whole story. Constant streaming ads and background updating are the real problems. Entities like "doubleclick.ads" and "google.ads" are epidemic!

In the old days I used a pretty good firewall that would let me manually stop much of the junk and updating I didn't want during a surf session. That (free) program was bought out and used by a big name because it was better than theirs. Now I have to use Windows firewall or Zone Alarm if I want a freebee and they don't allow custom editing of the connection stream.

Also, I used to use an excellent ISA Zoltrex 56k hardware modem that won't work in a PCI slot today. The new ones are all software modems. I could possibly use an external hardware modem if I could find a good one for WinXP.

So, what's a dialup cheapskate to do for a usable connection??

Discussion is locked

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Re: dial up
Oct 8, 2013 6:29PM PDT

I'd use hosts (that's a file used by Windows) or Adblock (that's a free add-on for Firefox and possibly other browsers) to limit the number of ads read.

I just added adlog.cbsi.com and dw.cbsi.com to my hosts-file. That seem new domains used by cnet/cbs for ads.

Kees

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Hosts file edit
Oct 30, 2013 12:53PM PDT

Please detail this "hosts" file. Where is it? Is it part of registry or a text file to edit... add URLs to?

In WinXP, I did find a "hosts" file (has no extention) at C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc

I openned it in Notepad and this is content:

# Copyright (c) 1993-1999 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host

127.0.0.1 localhost

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dw.cbsi.com in hosts file
Jan 19, 2014 6:20AM PST

dw.cbsi.com is in the January 08, 2014 mvps hosts file.

(i've been using a modified hosts file for years and love it)

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Currently at #3 on some list.
Oct 9, 2013 8:05AM PDT