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Chris-
"Small images download just fine on dial up."
Yes, they do. And ten years ago, an entire web page was expected to be less than 30-40KB in size in order to download in under 30 seconds, the time at which most users will simply go away.
"However with large images it all just hangs there, I'm not sure why."
Dialup users still need pages under 30KB in size and 28kbps is still common for dialup. In some areas, AOL dialup has actually dropped to 3K on 56K lines, so 28kbps is more than many users will see. In the US, ISPs are terminating maintenance on their dial-up pools, except the ones trawling for the bottom end like Netzero.
Do the math: a low-end digicam is 3megapixels now, and a commodity grade cell phone over one megapixel. So one web page, with one commodity grade picture, totally exceeds the capability of one dial-up line for several minutes. That's just one picture--and web forums often have a half dozen or more per page.
I'm not arguing for or against, right or wrong. Just saying times have changed, the web has changed, and dial-up users have to face the reality of either disabling the glitzy stuff, or getting in line and waiting patiently for it while making breakfast and reading the mail. I suppose a really smart web server would interrogate the client and downsample the graphics to accomodate lower bandwidth clients...but computers aren't that smart yet.
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