Yesterday, I received in the mail Verizon offer to upgrade my DSL speed to 7.1 Mbps for $29.99 for the first six months, and $39.99 thereafter, with one year commitment. At present time, my up/down speed is 3360/608 kbps that cost me $29.95 per month. The speed I have suits us more than adequate in the sense that we do not watch much video clips. We just don't have time for it. Here is our dilemma - Would we be wasting money if we go for it after the first six months? What do you guys & gals think? i_Xp/VistaUser

I'm like you. I don't need any more than I already have. I wouldn't give them any more money. I have Verizon FIOS. The speeds were terrible until I ran TCPOptimizer from speedguide.net Then I had the advertised speeds. You might want to try it. It's for XP or 2000. There are special instructions for Vista. How do you know when a politician is lying? His mouth is moving.

Sounds kind of high already. I would normally say that you could recover bandwidth by using best practices but my guess is you already do that. Run a wireshark view of it to or other tools like netstat. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10