I am using a Pentium II 350 with 128 Mb Ram. After about 5 hours of internet surfing and downloading, it becomes unstable, with error messages (”GDI failure”) reported. With Netscape, the advice is to clear the cache memory. “Stability” returns when I restart the computer, but it means I have to go temporarily offline. Will it help if I get more RAM, or is there any other way? I tried System Tool’s Disk Cleanup while still online but that does not appear to help. What is cable modem and will telephone lines in ACT support this or do I have to have a special line? What is the speed? Is it useful if the ISP, news server or website is slow?

You said that you used Disk Cleanup to cleanup your hard drive while online but did you actually clear the cache of your web browser? The cache is where all web pages you view are downloaded temporarily so that the next time you go to a site you have previously visited, the web pages are already on your computer thus making loading faster. However, if you do not manually clear the cache often or if the maximum hard drive space the cache has been allocated is high, then it can grow quite large. To clear your cache, in Netscape, go to the ‘Edit’ menu > ‘Preferences’. Expand the tree which is labelled ‘Advanced’ and click ‘Cache’. From here, you can empty the disk cache and memory cache and also change the maximum hard drive and memory space the cache has been allocated. I have used Netscape Communicator to compile these instructions so they may differ depending on your version of Netscape. If the problem persists after you have cleared the cache, I suggest you use Internet Explorer for a while. This may narrow down the problem you are having to either Netscape, Windows, a combination of both (because GDI.EXE is a default Windows file), or even your hardware (because sometimes GDI errors can be caused by the computer’s CPU overheating, failing, or a side effect of being overclocked). Moving to your second question, Cable Modems are modems which allow your computer to hook up with a cable TV line and receive high speed internet access (around 1.5 megabits) so you do need a special line (basically the same one as is used for cable TV). Cable would probably make web sites and news servers load faster but it also really depends on the speed of the server which is sending you the information (eg. if you have a cable internet connection while the server only has a 33.6bps connection, the data you will receive will only be sent and received by you at the speed of the server (in this case, 33.6bps)). The main advantage of cable modems is that it is a permanent connection to the internet. Have a look at www.cablemodemhelp.com/ for more information on cable modems and also have a look at www.optushome.com.au and www.transact.actew.com.au/ for cable internet information relating to Australia.