(FORTUNE Magazine) – PARDON ME WHILE I WHINE A LITTLE.

Regular readers know that I have two houses, the Digital Manor in Silicon Valley and the Digital Ranch getaway in Santa Fe. Both houses are now hooked into the fabulous American Broadband High-Speed Network. So what's the problem? There's still a world of little things that the computer and the network do to annoy me. And there's nothing new or interesting to distract me from those daily vexations.

--Digital Manor: Here we still rely on a DSL (digital subscriber line) connection from Pacific Bell, our local telephone company. We also put in a couple of 802.11b wireless access points inside the house so that I can move my notebook computer around to the kitchen or porch or bedroom (something my wife is just thrilled about). But the wireless network seems slower than the DSL line, even though it's supposed to be faster. I guess there's always something in the way of the wireless signal. Whatever. After installing all this stuff, I'm getting slower access to the Internet than I was before. Whine.

Then there's my new Toshiba Portege 4000 with Windows XP. I think it is a real pig. I could be wrong, because there isn't anything "wrong" with the computer. But the machine seems to spend a lot of time chewing on the hard disk, and it insists on doing just one task at a time--this despite the fact that Windows XP is supposed to be the latest in multitasking operating systems, which supposedly lets you do multiple tasks at once and zip along productively.

But somehow Windows and most personal computers just don't behave quite as well as advertised. Tonight Windows XP warned me that the memory system was somehow overloaded and that XP would have to increase the size of some memory page. I don't know what the heck it was talking about (what can nonexperts think when they see messages like that?), but I do know that the machine is really slow. It took 90 seconds to check how much memory it had. It often takes two minutes to switch from one website to another. Whine.

Maybe it's Windows that's at fault; maybe it's the hardware designers, who you'd think would design something that works with Windows XP, since it is clearly the dominant operating system. All I know is that I'm irked that I got my company to buy a spanking-new computer that doesn't work any better than the old one. It's kind of embarrassing, particularly for a guy who's supposed to know what he's talking about. Whine.

--Digital Ranch: It took a long time to get this place hooked up to broadband, but thanks to a company called Megapath Networks we now have an IDSL line, which provides a basic 144 kilobits per second (Kbps) signal. In theory, that's about one-sixth the speed I get in the Valley. But here's what's weird: When I use my Toshiba Portege 4000 in Santa Fe, I get web performance that equals what I get in California. What gives?

What gives is that the central cool fact about the Internet--that every computer is connected to every other computer--also slows the whole thing down. To get really great performance you must have a really fast connection. And 864 Kbps is only six times faster than 144 Kbps. If I could get 1.5 megabits on my connection in California, that might be noticeably faster, but I can't get it. A cable modem would be faster for certain tasks, like downloading photos, but not for others, like uploading them. I could really step up and lease a T-1 line, which many businesses rely on. But that costs as much as $500 a month, a little pricey for Internet access. Whine.

Get the idea? Broadband for us normal people isn't all that broad a band. It's better than a dial-up modem, but not enough so to make up for the standard computing woes. When you do get a little performance boost, you enjoy it briefly and then forget about it because you quickly figure out that the boost was not enough to make you a happy computer user. And the future doesn't look bright--there isn't anything happening in the world of broadband that promises a real performance upgrade for at least two or three years. Whine, whine, whine.

In fact, with Microsoft and other developers grinding out more software code to make machines work harder, life in the fast lane seems to be slowing down. That's just an impression, of course--in truth, things are getting faster, bit by very slow bit. That tends to be the pace of progress in tech, but we forgot that for a while, because the vision--everyone connected to everyone at lightning speed--was so compelling that all we wanted to do was crow. But now all we want to do is whine.

STEWART ALSOP is a partner with New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm. Except as noted, neither he nor his partnership has a financial interest in the companies mentioned. He can be reached at alsop_infotech@fortunemail.com. His column may be bookmarked online at www.fortune.com/technology/alsop.