Lotterybraker, you are way ahead of some people. I was talking to a woman this week whose computer is sluggish and I mentioned cleaning out her cache and asked when she last ran the defrag. She said "never" and she's had the computer for 3 or 4 years!! Some people don't know what an Operating System is or how much RAM they have.
I have Embarq DSL and often there is too much traffic congestion, which is very annoying. I'm using a line filter, since my phone line has static too. I actually notice very little difference when I am simply surfing the net between my 1.5mbps DSL and my dialup, although the speed is 25-30 times faster. Downloading files and videos is usually very fast however. There are tests available online that will evaluate your connection speed to make sure you are really running at the speed you're paying for, and I'm sure Comcast has their own.
By the way, I am far from computer savvy. I just figured out a long time ago that asking people on boards is often better than calling the Help Desk. One thing I recently did was go to START and RUN and type msconfig to uncheck several programs that were running unnecessarily in the background at startup. I've done this for years, but if you don't feel comfortable, you can always run a log and ask someone to evaluate the processes that are running. Average amount is around 40, but some people I know have 90 running simultaneously which drains your resources. Most people run at least a dozen programs they never use, but don't bother to disable them. Another clue is if you have too many icons next to your clock. You can always disable programs you're not using. I uninstalled the Embarq software. Just a lot of extra junk. I just got an AIO, because it was the same price as a regular inkjet printer ($69) and HP has so much extra stuff on their software disk that it affected my computer's performance. So for now, since I'm not using digital imaging (I don't even own a digital camera!) I disabled everything but what I need to print and it works really great.