low FPS & Bandwidth with 1.1 MB DSL connection

Hello,

does anyone have any suggestions about how to increase the fps in SL? I just upgraded to a 1.1-1.3 Mbps dsl connection, have done a speed test to confirm it on the web, and came into SL to see if it was any better, and it's the same.

On my home land, in a new sim (Ess), I'm getting an average of 12 fps and the bandwidth meter hovers between 16 and 20 kbps. The game is okay at that speed, but I recently was in SL on a computer that had 45 fps and it was just amazing. Ping sim and ping user were about 80 msec.

I went to a club to check the reading there. There was about 35 people on this sim, and my fps went down to between 2.1 and 4.3, making the game almost unusable. Couldn't move hardly at all. Kbps was from 500 - 700 kbps. Ping sim and ping user were all over the place, from 267 to 843 msec.

Any suggestions on how to improve the fps? I am on an imac G5, with 512 mb ram. I've got another 512 mb of ram coming in the mail to see if that will help.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

cheers,
forest

Also,

I have been in the wiki and have messed around with all of the graphic settings in Prefernces. Nothing really changed all that much, except when I increased the draw rate to large distances, the fps went way down to 2.3.

Any other ideas in addition to what is in the wiki on setting preferences to optimized performance would be greatly appreciated.

ciao.
forest