High speed is more expensive, but you can find it reasonable priced if you shop around. If you are in an area with SBC, you can usually get their dsl service for under $20/month.Going through cable will cost more, but it is faster. We have cable internet and it runs us $33/month.

Since your computer is constantly connected to the internet, yes, it is less secure. However, you can take simple steps to manage this. First, get a good antivirus: we like AVG by Grisoft. It's free for personal use and one of the absolute best antiviruses avaliable. Set it up to run regularly. Second, set up a firewall. Weather that be on your home network or just using the free Windows Firewall on your computer, set one up. Third, set up decent security setting for internet in your control panel. And fourth, what you should be doing anyway, is not giving personal information or downloading/opening any file that you aren't 100% positive what it is.

We did all of these setting a few years ago, and have never had a problem. There have been a handful of times that an infected file was found on the antivirus, but since we set them up to run pretty consistantly, there was no damage done.

Good luck!

-Lucky

We would never go to dial up. It may be more expensive for high speed but it's so worth it, to us. My MIL still has dial up and I can't really send her any emails with pics of the kids because it takes so long to download them.

My dh, just last night, did "threaten" to go to dial up because I've been spending so much time on the computer lately!