First off, for P2P programs, 56K sucks. Been there, done that. I used cable, which was expensive and now have DSL and am very happy with it. There are many DSL options out there starting at 14.95 a month which is highly competitive with any of the dial-up ISP's. Investigate them instead of trying to optimize a dead horse. It will be so much easier on your mind. As an example, I am DLing 6 files@129 to 169 KB/s which is truly amazing. I am also using Beta .35