Question : Problem: Internet Setup - Sympatico ISP

I have just switched ISP's to a company called Sympatico from a company called I-Star.  I am using a 386 with 16 meg of RAM, DOS 5.0, Windows 3.1 and a 28.8 modem. I have about 20 meg of disk space left.  

On my old provider, the service while slow was acceptable, but on the new provider I am consistently getting times of 3 minutes, 5 minutes and even longer to load web pages, to load newsgroups and it seems to take longer to send and receive mail.  

The ISP indicated that even with my setup I should expect to load their homepage in well under a minute.  

Could there be a problem with the way my configuration interacts with the Sympatico setup, or could my browser be wrongly configured. On the old provider I was using IE, while on the new one I am using Netscape. Could this make a difference?  

Answer : Problem: Internet Setup - Sympatico ISP

As magigraf said, what browser you use does not make much of an impact on how fast it goes.  Sure it might matter a few seconds, but not minutes.  Sympatico probably has a worse and or different internet connection.  What you need to get is a utility that can "ping" a server.  I don't know where to get one for Win 3.1, but www.shareware.com, www.download.com, or www.hotfiles.com probably has one.  Then ping the site you want to visit.  On a 28.8, a ping of about 300-350 is average.  230 or so is very nice, and 500 is getting up there.  The geographical location can also matter.  If you are on the east coast, then web sites on the west coast will take longer to load.  And then there is the fact that you don't always take a direct route to that web site.  I lived in Dallas, but my ISP hooked up to the internet in a place in Chicago.  Lets say I wanted to see a site on a server in Houston.  The info the server sent had to go all the way to Chicago, then to Dallas to get to me, making it very slow.   There are numerous things that could be slowing it down, but it usually is your ISPs fault.  The best strategy is to just shop around...see if the ISP will give you 5 days free and then go visit a few sites and see how the speed is