Having an external modem has a lot more advantages than an internal modem for the world of broadband. Although I don't even remember this being an option.

However, the modem itself connects to a network card in your PC. Doing this you have a small LAN connected to a WAN (wide-area-network). You can connect a router to the cable modem and then to the network card in your PC and potentially have multiple connections to your cable modem. I know, not all of you have 3-4 computers running, but for those of us who do, its a nice thing.

You won't lose any speed as the network is running between 10-100Mbps and the modem is running at (hopefully) 1 mbps. So you have PLENTY of speed for that.

As for the operating system. Go to at least 2000 and if its possible jump to XP home. Back up all the important stuff (this is where a network can come in handy), reformat the drives to NTFS, and reinstall the base applications. Then reinstall the data and you will be much happier.

Windows 95 (and even 98 to a point) suffered from operating system decay. Made it unstable and slow.