Speed is always an issue. If your operating system setting are not proper or there is any virus on your pc than your internet connection becomes slow. Proper settings of hardware and software can avoid this problem. There are some softwares designed to boost your internet speed. Netsonic is one of them. Netsonic fine tune your pc. It can download webpages in background. Download manager can download faster from specified link. Flashget is my favorite.
How to speedup your modem –
There are many reason of slow internet connection. On of them improper setting of modem. By default the setting of the modem’s com port may be on the lower side. By default baud rate of all Com ports of your machine is set to 9600. We can change it in case if our modem support higher speeds. Here are steps for changing baud rate -
(1) Goto ‘control panel’.
(2) Click on ‘system’ icon.
(3) Choose device manager tab in window that appear after clicking ‘system’.
(4) Go to ‘ports’ (COM and LPT). Click on the + sign and go to the ‘Communication ports’ where is your modem is connected. It can be COM2.
(5) Click on properties button. Again click on ‘port settings’.
(6) In the ‘bits per second’ field, you can set this to 115200bps if your modem support 56kbps connection.
You can also download third party tools like modem booster which can detect and set most favorable conditions for your modem. Because all the setting are done automatically so there is no need of system tweaking.
Note – Iam using Win98 and WinXp with dual booting. Above settings can be used in Win98.

I'm just curious. Are you dual-booting 98 and XP so you can run the older legacy programs on 98?

Web-pages get downloaded in the background by your browser, the only real way to make it any faster on a 56k modem is if the webserver serving the page uses gzip encoding and caching techniques on your end.

Although you can set the bits higher in the operating system software, 56 kilobits is what your modem is bottle necked at in the firmware/hardware.