How do I troubleshoot?

Greetings,
I have an XP sp-2 desktop, that is a couple of years old now and I am having
issues with it, mainly online. The applications work very well, documents,
Word, Excel, etc. but when it is online, it is super slow, almost as if
something is wrong, but I can't put my finger on it. I have dial-up,(for now
anyway) and the hard drive is only about 1/3 full, and I could use more
memory, but it used to be faster with the same memory, so I don't know if
that is the problem. I have done all the scans, AV, S & D, to be sure it is
clean. How do I go about troubleshooting to pin down what the problem is?
Maybe the modem is intermittantly bad.
It is just so very slow on downloading, I think something is wrong. I also
have a downloaded accelerator, that works sometimes, but I can't seem to get
it to start at all now.
Also, I don't know if this is related or not, but when I boot up, the config
window comes up(I guess because I have changed a setting or two there) and
when I try to ok out of it, I get an access denied msg. I click ok and it
boots up just fine. Someone told me that this msg could indicate a more
serious problem, but I don't know what.
Anyway, I know this is a little long, but I could use some help. Any
suggestions?
Jim

Hi
Check for Viruses and other parasites they usually slow down the Internet
connection.
Winter weather can degrade telephone line and contribute to the problem too,
May be this can Help.
http://www.ezlan.net/infestation.html
http://www.ezlan.net/clean.html
Jack (MVP-Networking).

"JS" <sivright@ultravision.net> wrote in message
news:eaEw8p5XIHA.4880@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...
> Greetings,
> I have an XP sp-2 desktop, that is a couple of years old now and I am
> having issues with it, mainly online. The applications work very well,
> documents, Word, Excel, etc. but when it is online, it is super slow,
> almost as if something is wrong, but I can't put my finger on it. I have
> dial-up,(for now anyway) and the hard drive is only about 1/3 full, and I
> could use more memory, but it used to be faster with the same memory, so I
> don't know if that is the problem. I have done all the scans, AV, S & D,
> to be sure it is clean. How do I go about troubleshooting to pin down what
> the problem is? Maybe the modem is intermittantly bad.
> It is just so very slow on downloading, I think something is wrong. I also
> have a downloaded accelerator, that works sometimes, but I can't seem to
> get it to start at all now.
> Also, I don't know if this is related or not, but when I boot up, the
> config window comes up(I guess because I have changed a setting or two
> there) and when I try to ok out of it, I get an access denied msg. I click
> ok and it boots up just fine. Someone told me that this msg could indicate
> a more serious problem, but I don't know what.
> Anyway, I know this is a little long, but I could use some help. Any
> suggestions?
> Jim
>