yes I know… who uses an old dial up modem now… Well my parents as they live in a very rural area and I can’t see them getting a broadband connection… cos well technology and old people… should I say more… 
probably get flamed for that but its true, they aren’t going to pay for it. So anyway, I was down there this weekend for a bit of R&R. When looking at a page it seems to load (watching the icon in the top corner or IE finish its little animation to tell you information has all downloaded) then there would be a several seconds of delay before the actual forum appears again.
S`funny I was looking in to this tonight for my DSL connection. Not the fastest but does a good job for the money. Watch videos download HUGE files no probs, but from time to time runs slooooow when loading pages for some strange reason.
A new tip I found today was on the Explorer updates homepage,
Its all them fancy graphics, sounds movies, animations etc they are cramming on to our web pages now. Do a bit of tweaking on the internet options control panel, advanced and disable all the “play” settings in multimedia. (Explorer 6)
Im finding it speeds up my DSL connection no end since adjusting these settings.
Any one with problems should try testing your PC on the link below. I have used it for a few years now with no probs.
Good thing is its free…
Sounds like a very under-powered computer having trouble uncompressing the http-stream from our server. The site sends out compressed content which your computer has to uncompress to view. We use it to save our bandwidth costs, as do many other sites.
This compression stuff doesn’t even register on modern computers. Of course, if your folks computer isn’t slow, then sorry, I don’t know 
Its a laptop and it was new last christmas. Don’t think the spec is too terrible… but it was from PC World 
Could be a problem with too much stuff in the system tray. Does seem to take a long time to load up.
I’ve found that viewing the forum with Firefox speeds it up a tad. Been at work using IE and have sat there for ages in the past waiting for a page to load, but with FireFox, no worries.