I've tried, to no avail, to speed up my computer. What else is new?
you're asking yourselves. Well, here's my latest question: If I
disconnect from our in-home network and get my very own connection to
the Internet, will I notice fast, fassster, fasssssstest computing? (I
do a lot of design work in Illustrator and a lot of
uploading said designs to an online site.)

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Clarification of Question by k8hayes-ga on 21 Oct 2005 09:09 PDT

OK, more precise: I've disabled Norton. I've stripped unnecessary
stuff from running resident. I have a PC (Dell) with about 1 gig
processor and I'm not sure about the memory. My husband bought the
computer 4 years ago, and he usually gets the most bang for his buck,
so I assume it has lots (sorry, I'm at work right now; can't check;
not so precise). I really am mostly interested in whether or not it
would be worth my money to pay for a separate internet connection and
get off our network. The comments about uploading are most helpful,
thanks! So...

If I make sure I have at least 1gig RAM, and get my own internet
connection, I should notice a significant diff?

Thanks, you guys. I know it's tiresome trying to get specific
information out of us normal folks. I'm trying to be as computer-geeky
as I can these days! <<wink wink>>

You need to be more precise. 
Do you need a faster computer or faster connection.
You can speed up your PC computing power by upgrading the RAM to 1GB
or more, the HDD with a larger cache memory and faster RMM(7200 or
higher like SATA), or to buy a new faster PC, I recommend Power Mac G5
with two dual core CPUs since you are doing graphical stuff.
And for faster internet connection get a individual separate account,
connection that you wont share with others.

Peace

I suspect it's more to do with something you have running on your
computer. Probably Norton Antivirus/Internet Security, which are both
pigs.

I'd remove it/them and get something a little more slimline such as
Nod32 for viruses and Agnitium Outpost or Sygate Personal for a
firewall. Even the basic Windows Firewall is better than Norton, which
is obtrusive and thouroughly resource draining, not to mention that
every script kiddy worth his salt has malware designed to attack
norton.

You might also like to turn off some of the programs that run on
startup. In WinXP you can click Start>Run and enter msconfig - this
will start a utility that allows you to turn on/off services, startup
programs and alter boot files. You should click on the startup tab and
uncheck anything that you don't like the look of. Infact, you're quite
safe unchecking all of them! Be aware though, that some programs may
take a little longer than normal to load since they are not already in
memory, but seeing as they're taking up memory you wouldn't otherwise
be using for them it's unlikely to make much difference, also the
loading time difference is only a matter of a couple of seconds at
most.

Defragmenting your hard drive may also be a good idea. Windows' native
defragger isn't exactly great, you should try something like
PerfectDisk Workstaion which groups program files together on the
drive rather than ordering them in a recently accessed order.

Spyware can also cause serious performance problems, download
Ad-Aware, Spybot and Giant/Microsoft Spyware remover. Each has it's
own merits and are stronger in different areas so a selection is
always advised. Note that if these programs are set up to run a
constant antispyware program in memory, this can quite seriously dent
your performance.

Some of the services that are running on your PC aren't needed, you
should have a look at this guide and disable anything that you aren't
going to use. http://www.theeldergeek.com/services_guide.htm

Lastly, and the only thing that's going to cost you some money here is
memory, which is cheap at the moment so take advantange and get at
least 1gb. I'd recommend about 2gb for very intensive programs, but
Illustrator isn't all that power hungry, just a bit slow when it's
bogged down.

Good luck and enjoy your faster pooter.

Internet conections are normally the bottleneck
- especially if you are uploading

If you are sitting with a load of other people who are also
frantically uploading and downloading then your own connection might
help.

Faster machines are better for /viewing/ downloaded pages as they can
do the graphics calculations faster - but normally they really just
get the data at the same speed as a normal machine.

Since you are concerned about uploading, the last paragraph is
intentionally irrelevant.

What sort of connection do you have ?
ADSL, DSL, Cable, ISDN, Dialup ?

Remember, you can't catch data faster than it is sent, and you can't
send data faster than it is received.

Four years ago ...
- it would be helpful to know what OS you are running
eg: Win98  Win2k

Also the type of internet connection that you have.

As others have said a faster Hard Disk and a bit more RAM can make a
significant difference and is fairly inexpensive.

Unless someone else in your household is generating a heck of a lot of
network (and internet) activity then having your own connection is
unlikely to help.

To give you an example, my favourite machine is an old P160 and I'm on
a 2mbit ADSL
- uploading and downloading on my 2.7ghz machine is not any faster,
although displaying graphics is many times quicker
- although not that much faster than my other old P500

1ghz is fine for most things. You don't need a hardware upgrade, but
you do need to enable a firewall to cut down the network traffic. Try
Sygate Personal or Zonealarm for simplicity and ease.

Still need to know which version of Windows you're running!

@Dirtbox-ga

I hide behind an ADSL Router with all ports blocked, it passes Steve
Gibson's probing tests.

Do you reckon that would be appropriate for K8hayes ?

Of course a firewall would show up malign outbound traffic, but
malware is another type of problem.