- Speed Up and Fix Up Your Dial-Up
- Bring Me a New Brain, Igor!
- What You Need to Know to Perform Brain Surgery on Your Modem
- Don't Just Call Any Number (Choosing the Correct Dial-Up Number)
- It's Not Your Modem—It's Your Phone Line
- Testing, Testing—Is Your Phone Line Ready to Rumble?
- Tweaking Your System for Faster Speed
- Adding Extra Horsepower to Your Internet Connection
- Software That Makes Tweaking Easier
- Super Glue Two Modems Together with Bonding
- How Bonding Works
- Will Your ISP Approve?
- Upgrading Windows 95 for Multilink Support
- Setting Up a Multilink Connection on Your Computer
- "We Interrupt This Online Session..." (Getting Calls While You're Online)
- Grabbing Messages While You're Online
"We Interrupt This Online Session..." (Getting Calls While You're Online)
One of the most pressing reasons, besides download speed, for switching to a broadband service is the problem of tying up your phone line while you surf the Net. Call-waiting services by themselves don't help because most modern modems ignore the faint click that call waiting uses to signal you that another call is coming in.
Although you can adjust your modem's sensitivity to call waiting, you do so at the cost of creating a very fragile connection that will constantly hang up when any kind of line noise is encountered. A far better solution is to use one of the new, usually free, telephone answering services that intercept incoming calls and route them to a voice-mail box while playing the caller's message over your computer's speakers. More elaborate versions of these services give you additional options.