yeah keeping your computer clean of things you don't need is a big one for speed. check your registry too, the startup folders in there can have programs that don't have any use to you. i used dr. solomon's power tools and it worked great on my adsl connection, it runs at 1.2 Mbs now so i can't complain much. i tried the optimize windows thing that came with it and that made my computer lock up for 5 minutes when it started but i uninstalled it and everything works better now. my time for loading my parents computer, which has lots of stuff on it because my mom puts stuff everywhere then gets mad when she can't find it, is about 2-3 mins from a cold start and it runs windows 98. be carefull with network settings though, if you set them wrong your computer might be able to download faster but your packet loss can go up a lot and sometimes your nic will hang for a few seconds. at least that's my experience.