Unless you use your dial-up modem for faxing or internet you probably don’t have much use for it. However there are some good software titles to make it useful again.

PhoneTray is a product (and yes there’s a free version on that site) that will show Caller ID and also has the ability to "zap" telemarketer calls as well.

Telemarketing blocker more or less does the same job as PhoneTray does.

Using Windows Vista? Not to worry, there’s Vista Caller-ID software – and it’s free.

For those of you out there that don’t have a dial-up modem but are interested in using it per the methods above, there are USB 2.0 compliant hardware modems you can purchase like this one (and you’ll be amazed at how small they are).

A recently conducted study has proven that those who choose to use dial-up internet (yes, the agonizingly slow method of getting online) do more so by choice rather than lack of choice.

Explained: There are more than a few people out there (35% of all dial-uppers in the USA – a huge chunk) that just don’t consider broadband worth the price tag. It is available to them but purposely choose the low-cost dial-up option instead.

And if you guessed most of these folks are in rural areas, you guessed correct.

If I were to use (shudder) dial-up internet I would definitely have to switch to lightweight apps to do my stuff, that being:

Opera. I wouldn’t think twice about this. I would switch to Opera as my web browser because it loads pages the fastest (some would disagree with that but it’s faster to me).

Miranda. A super-super-lightweight multi-protocol chat client. Many people (even with really fast connections) swear by this. I would use it simply because of one reason: Speed. The only faster way to chat is from the command line.

Sylpheed. This is a lightweight e-mail client. Has Linux and Windows versions available. Again, this is all about speed. When using dial-up a client is faster than webmail in a browser.

I’d probably change over a few other apps I use as well just to get the lightest possible load that takes the absolute least amount of bandwidth.

In fact there’s a darn good chance I’d purposely just use a lightweight Linux distribution to take care of all this stuff for me like Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux. Lightweight OS generally means lightweight apps. And with lightweight apps that connect to the internet, they usually (but not always) don’t consume as much bandwidth.