I’m helping out somebody with a flakey dial-up connection. When it connects the speed is reported as 44KB/s. I feel the problems lie with the modem settings, because more often than not there’s an excruciatingly long handshake with much hiss at the end, then a connection failure. It’s been a long time since I ventured into wonderful world of dial-up and I’ve only come up with setting modem speed to 57600 max. and using the init string AT+MS=V34 (at the advice of the ISP).
I can get a “clean” connection dialling from my 33.6 External on my own computer. She could also get consistently clean reliable connections on her old computer using a D-Link 56K external.
Before I embark on my “mercy mission”, I’m wondering if there’s anything else to try or check on. O/S is XP Home 2002, upgraded with SP3 and IE7.
Alan
All of those points are worthy of checking. Again though, I doubt it’s a congestion/ time-of-day issue, since she claims to have always had flawless connections with the old box. (She even had to ask, “What’s a dropout?” 
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