Supersonic dial-up web access - Part 1

Today, one in five households in the UK still remains beyond the reach of either ADSL or cable broadband technologies, with availability dropping off sharply the further away you live from towns and cities.

Although this still leaves the majority of UK households with the option of signing up to high-speed internet access, only around one in seven has actually done so. Clearly, broadband is neither in universal supply nor demand, which leaves an awful lot of us still connecting to the internet through a modem and the telephone line.

The good news is that there are several practical steps you can take both to speed up your dial-up internet connection and to ensure you waste less time online, with the consequences of making better use of your internet connection while reducing your phone bill.

If you want to try and inject some speed into your surfing, read on for advice on making the very most of your modem.

Soft options
The first thing you can do to speed up your internet connection is take advantage of specialist speed-up software. There are many such products around, though some of them inevitably work much better than others.

Broadly speaking, this software can be divided into two groups. One approach uses compression to reduce the size of web pages you are viewing and thus the amount of data that must be downloaded to your computer. A page compressed to half its original size can appear in your browser in half the time.

There are inevitably trade-offs to be made if you're using compression to speed up your connection speed. The more compression you apply to an image, for example, the more clarity is sacrificed in the process.

However, the compromise between speed and quality can usually be fine-tuned and for everyday purposes you may be perfectly content with slightly blurry images if the result is markedly faster surfing.

Besides, when you come across an image that you want to see in its full glory, you can temporarily suspend compression. The alternative, though not mutually exclusive, approach involves tweaking hidden Windows settings in order to make a modem handle data more efficiently and there is software that will take care of this fiddly business for you.

Saving plan
When you direct your browser to a specific web page, what you are actually doing is transferring digital files such as text, pictures and music files to your own PC.

In the same way, once you have opened and viewed a web page in your browser, you can save a copy on your own computer. This way you can revisit the page later and read it at your leisure when your computer is disconnected from the internet without tying up your telephone line or racking up call charges.

To save a single web page at any time, wait for the page to open fully in Internet Explorer and select Save As from the File menu. Make sure that "Web page (complete)" appears in the Save as Type field before you click Save. Thereafter, to open and read this page while your computer is offline, double-click the saved file and the page will open in your browser.

Saving a web page is complicated by it not being a single, self-contained file like, for example, a Word document. Even a simple web page comprises an HTML file containing text, hyperlinks and information about the overall layout of the page, plus a separate folder holding images, animations and sound files.

This file and folder must be saved and kept together in a single folder on your computer for the page to display properly. We recommend creating a new folder within your My Documents folder specifically for storing web pages.

Play favourites
You can also select web pages from your Favorites list of websites that you regularly visit to view offline. To do this click on the Favorites button in your browser, right-click on the appropriate link in your Favorites list and choose Make available offline. A step-by-step guide will take you through the rest of the process.

You'll need to instruct your modem to revisit the live version of the web page on the web periodically and update the offline copy on your PC with fresh content. You might, for instance, choose to update selected Favorites overnight when call charges are cheapest.

Of course, there are other ways to save web pages. For one, just click the print button to print off a hard copy. It's amazing how often we forget to do something this simple and spend ages reading text online at 5p per minute while we could just as easily do so later for free.

Alternatively, to save yourself some ink, copy relevant sections of text from a web page into a word processing document. All you need to do is highlight the target text and select Copy from the Edit menu on your browser toolbar. Then open your word-processing application and click Edit and Paste.

If you prefer, you can right-click on the page and choose Select All to copy everything (including adverts and images) in one go.

Also keep an eye out for web content that can be downloaded in file form rather than viewed in a browser. Acrobat files (those that end with .pdf) are a case in point. When you come across a link to a pdf file, right-click on it and select Save Target As to save the file to your computer rather than opening it in your browser. You can now read it offline. Pictures and some video clips can be saved in exactly the same way.

Work smarter
If you're connecting to the internet using a dial-up connection, you'll be all too aware that you are paying by the minute for the privilege. There are plenty of ways, however, to make the time you spend online more productive.

If you spend a lot of time online surfing for the latest news stories, you should consider an 'aggregator' service like FeedDemon to pull in headlines from a wide range of online news services. The idea is that you can see what's happening in the world at a glance and follow up on any leads that take your fancy without having to surf a dozen separate sites.

FeedDemon, which you can download for free here, presents you with just the bare bones of a story, so it loads very quickly indeed. Alternatively, there is SharpReader and NewsWatcher, both of which will do a similar job for you.

To save having to open the same cluster of favourite web pages time and again, save them as a session. This way, you can open several pages simultaneously with a single click. Session saving is a built-in feature of Opera and Mozilla, the two leading alternative browsers to Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer itself does not offer session saving.

Cache control
Your browser uses a special folder called a 'cache' to store copies of the web pages you view as you surf. The advantage of this is that when you revisit a cached page, the browser can pluck it or elements of it straight from the cache on your PC and display the page almost instantaneously.

For obvious reasons, this makes the most difference when you regularly revisit the same pages on a regular basis. To get the most from your cache, open Internet Explorer, click Tools, then select Internet Options and click on the General tab. Now click the Settings button in the Temporary Internet files section.

Here you can allocate a sizeable chunk of your hard disk to the cache, if you have space to spare. As a rule, the larger the cache, the more pages the browser can store and the greater the benefit.

Also note the Check for newer versions of stored pages options. These determine when and whether Internet Explorer should check the live online version of a saved page for fresh content. This is particularly important with pages that update frequently. If you select Never here your browsing will be faster but you'll end up reading yesterday's and, eventually, last week's news.

The best option overall is to select the Automatically option, as this forces the browser to check pages you looked at on an earlier day or an earlier surfing session.