Hey Gang,
First off, thank you for taking the time to take a look at my situation. I'm hoping I can find some advice out there from someone that has dealt with this before.
SITUATION: I have a home network consisting of 3 WinXP Pro PC's and they connect through a hub and a Linksys Wireless router. The three PC's are cat-5 connected to the router and I use Win XP ICS Sharing with the DHCP server disabled on the router. On occasion there are two laptops that connect wirelessly (my two kids when home from college) in order to surf the internet.
CONDITION: My internet connection is 56K modem Dialup. Yes, that's right, I said dialup. I know you're shocked and disappointed...but that's the best I can get where I live. There is no DSL available, no cable broadband (unless I want to spend 10,000 dollars to run the cable myself for an 1/8th of a mile), and for my purposes, satellite broadband is slower than dialup.
USAGE: My wife and I play Everquest 2, and Everquest, and have for 7 years now. For those of you that aren't familiar with this, it's a MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). Much like World of Warcraft or Guild Wars, or the countless doznes of others out there. For years, we both had our own internet connection (two phone lines, two dialup connections, one for hers and one for mine), and it worked fine with only occasional "lag". I even toyed with modem teaming for the network (with limited success) using XP's Multilink framework. In any event, those solutions haven't been available to me for some time. We can't afford the second phone line right now, and have been sharing my connection for a little over a year. We can play, and do, but we do get some serious latency issues as you can imagine.
QUESTION: I'm not asking for miracles here, and I know full well what I am dealing with. Any help or insight you can provide will be much appreciated. My question is this:
What modem settings would get me the best pings to a known and static server and what piece of software would you recommend to implement them?
Once again, thank you for any time you spend on this. Feel free to ask any questions you deem important.
