Can installing a NIC slow down my dial up Internet connection? I have 2 machines: a Windows98SE and a Win95 machine. I installed NICs and set up internet connection sharing. It worked fine but my internet connection, which was consistantly at 50 – 52K for years, slowed down to 28.8 on average and sometimes even slower. I thought this was because the bandwidth was shared so I removed the ICS but no luck. I checked with the phone company for noise on the line but it’s clear and I haven’t changed ISPs. I then disabled the NIC (from device manager) but that still had no effect. Could just the physical presence of the NIC do something like this? The only thing I haven’t tried yet is actually taking it out. Oh yeah, both machines alwaysconnected fast but now both are slow even when I move the phone line directly to the modem on each machine. Any thoughts?