On 23 Sep 2005 at 23:48, Dennis Dittmar wrote:

> I have a homebuilt Win98SE, with a Winmodem, 256M ram, 60 Gig HD, IE
> 6.0. When I download something the transfer rate starts high and then
> continually falls as the d/l continues. Is there anything I can set to
> keep it fixed at my landline rate (usually 44,000)? I've read on here
> about MTU size changes that help.

  A larger MTU size reduces some overhead, but increases the impact of line
noise.  If you're consistently getting 44K connection speeds, this may help
you.  [Those of you on broadband or LAN connections are almost certainly
already at the maximum; this only applies to dial-up.]

  However, the effect of an MTU change should be uniform across the duration
of any largish download, and the fact that you're seeing a decline suggests
that there's another factor here that may be more critical.

  As you probably know, a WinModem uses the computer CPU to do much of the
work that was done by actual circuitry in hardware modems.  So this means
that your CPU needs to divide its attention between performing these modem
functions in a timely manner, and managing the file download and disk write -
- and anything you might be doing during the download.
  I'm not totally confident that the 9x Windows versions (95, 98, 98SE, ME)
do a robust job of juggling multiple processes like this.  So there may not
be a really good fix.

  Three things that *might* help, though:

1.  Statically allocate the swap file.  With a 60GB drive, space is probably
not much of an issue.  If you reserve a fixed size for the swap file,
Windows will stop having to hunt for space whenever it needs to grow it.

2.  Defragment your drive.  Again, Windows will have to do less hunting for
space for your downloaded file.

3.  See if there's an affordable way to upgrade to a faster CPU.  The faster
the CPU, the less chance that multiple processes will be trying to preempt
each other.

David Gillett

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