I have the same opinion, no matter what you do to tweak your dialup, it's still a dialup connection, 53k downstream and 33.6k upstream (until v.92 came out).. it's the physical limitation. some other program will try to cache pages/images in your HD, but if you like me that go to a lot of different places and new places everyday, it'll never work.
The new Opera 5 browser allows you to load the pages without the image until you let it load, it's a good alternative way to browsing, bypass most of the images.. (well, I'm 95% satisfied with it...)