Grampa, with all due respect............
peel open your wallet and pay for high-speed Internet access, would ya?? I'm no spring chicken myself, but I coughed up for high speed access and there is NO problem with download speeds, etc.
To equate slow refresh / download speeds with the downfall of FR due to Islamicists is a bit over the top, my friend. :)
peel open your wallet and pay for high-speed Internet access, would ya??
Easy. It is
not the bandwidth that's the problem. It's slow on high speed lines as well. I'm on a T-3 right now (45 Mbits/sec) and FreeRepublic is slow. Once the FR server finally responds to a request and starts sending down the new page, all is well.
And as others have noted, it's not the pictures that are causing the load on the FR server. The FR server just sends down a few words of html that address some picture on a site such as Yahoo or whitehouse.gov, and then your PC directly accesses Yahoo or whatever to get the actual picture.
In the middle of the night, it's fine. But otherwise whether at work on this T-3, or at home on my DSL, the FR server is taking many seconds (varys alot) to respond (to even begin sending any data) to each request.
I have high speed inter-net access and new, very fast computer and I still had trouble with Free Republic the last few days. I couldn't even get on at times. I was having no trouble with any other site.