With Anniversary Bash 5 coming up, I said that I'd host a preliminary all-day or all-week (depending on how long my computer lasts with the freak weather southern Ontario has been having) server in honour of AB5. I hosted it, per usual, like I do my other servers, but no one joined up. About fifteen minutes ago I joined Violet's hotel server (hotel... *shudders*) and asked around. The general response was that I was pinging way too much. Now, considering I can usually host servers with few to no problems, this came as a shock to me. My router's been finely tweaked, I have a cable connection, and a 1.3 GHz computer running Win98.

However, there is a catch. I was running both JJ2 1.21 and 1.24 at the same time, plus KaZaA, MSWord, and Winamp. In retrospect, if I wanted to host a moderately dedicated server, I probably should not have wasted all my memory. In any case, other than freeing up memory, is there any way to knock off additional lag time in some way without changing my connection?

JJ2 1.2x
Win98
1.3 GHz Pentium 3
Cable
Linksys router (already forwarded)

Thanks for your help.