Webuser Forums: WEB DOWNLOAD SPEED

Help, help, help. Can anyone assist a senior citizen (well almost, just a few months to go). My ISP is Wanadoo on dial-up. I live in a small village in Staffordshire and initially dial-up was the only connection available. Although Broadband eventually became availble last year I do not use the Internet sufficiently to justify the cost of Broadband. Up until recently I have not been concerned at the speed of connection or download but suddenly, almost overnight a few weeks ago there was a noticeable slowing up. As an example it takes 3 to 4 minutes for the Wanadoo Home Page to fully load and internet banking transactions take an absolute age. Just navigating round these webuser forum pages is taking also 3 to 4 minutes for a new page to download.

When this problem occurred it coincided with me receiving a lot of Incoming Connection Alerts from my personal firewall system (Kerio) advising me that connections from external ports were trying to connect. Most of these looked somewhat suspicious to me (examples are "kowabunga.dialup.pol.co.uk" and "duckdive.dialup.co.uk" and as far as I am aware anything that looked suspicious was denied but I am just wondering whether something has got into my computer without my knowledge and is slowing it up.

I initially spoke to the Wanadoo help desk who went through various settings etc and they also suggested I contact BT and get them to increase the "gain on the line" which I did and they subsequently got back to me and confirmed they had taken the appropriate action. More recently I have installed the Onspeed system in the hope that this would at least return my computer to the previous downlad speeds but nothing so far has made any difference. The current speed is generally around 40 Kbps but can't remember what it used to be. All I know is that it is a darned sight slower and I am becoming increasingly frustrated with it.

I have Ad-aware 6.0 and Spybot-Search and Destroy installed and try to run both of these at least once a week. I also regularly delete Cookies and temporary files but whatever I do it doesn't seem to make a scrap of difference. Unfortunately, although I have used a computer extensively for many years I am a bit of an ignoramous when it comes to the technical side of things.

Is there anyone out there that can offer any possible solution short of buying a new computer. I would add that although I live in a small village we have our own telephone exchange so the thought occured to me, Is the equipment up to the amount of traffic it now probably carries? I would add that this is the first time I have used a forum so appologies if I am not going about it in the correct manner.