Hardware upgrades to speed up internet

[cdh]

Last week I got a cable modem installed (Clearsource). While there was definite speed increase to some sites, others were not noticably faster.

I initialy thought that I needed to upgrade my CPU. After searching this and other forums for info, it appears that my Cpu is probably plenty fast.

Finally to my question, what hardware upgrades would show significant speed performance upgrade for the internet? (BTW, I have been experimenting with some of the registry tweaks at speedguide.net and dslreports.com, with some success.

My system:
AMD k6-2 400
Giga-byte GA-5ax
64 megs RAm
HD- Fireball SE 2.1gigs

My initial thought is to first upgrade ram (128) and then maybe HD. Any help would be appreciated. BTW computer use is predominantly word processing and the web.

Thanks
CDH

 

[thorin]

Are you running 95 or 98?

More memory can't hurt, you hard drive shouldn't affect Web Browsing much (accept for loading cached pages/images but IE handles this well anyway).

Thorin

 

[cdh]

Hey Thorin,

I am running 98. Browser is E5.0 and 5.5(just loaded 5.5 to check it out)

BTW, is my understandng that the cpu would not make much of a difference to internet access speed accurate?

Thanks,
CDH

 

[thorin]

Correct.

If you are running 98 and 5.0/5.5 I'd definately recommend movint up to 128MB.

Thorin

 

[rbV5]

Careful mixing registry tweaks! what is the download/upload speed you get? You should notice a HUGE difference in speed if you were using dialup before. Site speed has alot to do with THEIR bandwidth and traffic, that is why some sites are slower. IE5.5 will SLOW your access down over 5.0.

Memory is a good choice, its so cheap, it couldn't hurt. Same with a new hardrive. Win2k on my machine, is faster on the Net.

 

[Quickfingerz]

I cannot tell any difference between my 1000 mhz athlon (128 mb of ram) and my 266 mhz Pentium 2 (96 mb of ram) when both have my ATA 100 controller and my IBM 75GXP when browsing the internet.

summary: only hard drive speed and "enough" ram is all you need for fast browsing. I'd say that Quantum LM drives would be the best.

 

[EvilDonnyboy]

And a good browser. I wish i could go back to IE 5.0. But winME won't let me.