Yes, there are people who still use dialup >_>

For the past 7 years my parents have subscribed to the same localy-based ISP. It worked great, no real problems to speak of. Slower than normal connections at times, but thats to be expected.

Then, about a month ago, I began to experience problems with consistantly slow connection speed and the connection suddenly dropping out with no other fix than a restart. However, since I was only experiencing these problems with the 5 year old family box thats only been fully purged of malware once, and never significantly updated, I thought it was just the computer showing its age. Take note that when I began getting slower connection speeds the modem made different sounds than usual.

Then about 3 to 4 weeks ago, I began to experience problems connecting the thinkpad I use to this same connection. I would dial in, get a connection, but then while it was verifying the username and password, it would time out because 'the remote computer did not respond'. Again, the modem made slightly different sounds than usual. I figured, maybe the password is wrong. I retyped it, and it worked. Once. Then I tried reconnecting and I got the same message.
I tried restarting. Nothing. I tried shutting down and then powering up again. Nothing. I tried reducing the modems speed. Nothing. I tried editing the dialing rules. Nothing. I tried doing a system restore back to the last day that the connection worked properly. Still nothing. I was confounded, and I gave up.
2 weeks ago, the telephone company got our payment late, and turned off our phones for about half a day. When they came back on, I thought that mayhaps the connection would work again now that the phones had been 'reset', so to speak. Lo and behold, it worked! I was overjoyed, I thought my frustration and toil was at an end. After a long day of internet usage without the lag of the ancient family box, I disconnected and went to sleep. The next morning I woke up, ready to do some hardcore surfing and gaming with my mighty 50.2Kbps. I fired up the thinkpad, hit 'Dial' and went to the kitchen to get a drink. Upon returning to my room, I spilled my drink, for what did I find staring me in the face?

'The remote computer did not respond'

Needless to say, I was seething. The next day I was talking to one of my friends who is more knowledgeable in networking matters than I. I told him my dialup dilemma. He told me to go into the command prompt and type ipconfig /flushdns. I did so. Bear in mind that I was at the local internet cafe and was connected to the wireless there at the time.
I went home, and oh happy day I had my beloved connection again. Later that day my mother picked up the phone and knocked out my connection. I went to reconnect, and once again I found that loathesome message upon my screen. I stopped myself from flipping my computer the bird, and did the flushdns command again. To my vexation, the same message filled my screen again.
I was beginning to think that my computer was playing the 'guess what you have to do this time' game with me, and I was losing.
I went back to my friend, and told him that the message had surfaced once more. He said 'Well yeah, you need to be connected to use flushdns dummy.'

Ohhh...

So for the past few weeks, before leaving my college or the internet cafe, I do the flushdns command and then shut down the computer, all while still connected. This has worked somewhat, but if anything should interrupt my connection I am unable to reconnect untill repeating the process the next day.

Now, my question is, does this seem more like a problem that my ISP is having, or is it on my side? Also, is there a more permanent fix for my problem? IS there a computer God that hates me?

I searched the forums, but I found the topics dealing with dialup connections to be rather sparse, and none that dealt with my problem.

Thank you for your time and consideration