Chris Adamson: Nice Computer, Nasty Details. “Getting up and running with Mail and IE was easy enough (no, it didn’t have Safari pre-installed), but we kept getting dropped by Earthlink’s dial-up. — This is where having a supportive Apple community helps out. I posted a message to Apple’s support boards, which quickly generated a response suggesting I look into resetting the MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) value, a low-level networking config. Researching this, I found an article on Mac OS X Hints that described a one-line call to ifconfig to reset the value, and in the feedback, someone posted a good tip for using different packet sizes for ping to find an optimal value.”