Making synthetic speech more responsive & setting up dial up internet

[Ann]

Hi folks,

First of all, let me say that, while I was once quite proficient at 
command line Unix, and some command line flavors of Linux as well, the 
insidious Microsoft has completely ruined my command line knowledge over 
the last few  years. So, I guess I'm back to square one, if using any 
command line utilities are required here, and I am afraid that will be 
the case. I'm good at following instructions, though.

My computer is a 3 GHZ processor, with 768 MB of PC3200 DDR Ram, around 
400 GB of hard drive space, and has Windows XP Home. Now, I recently 
got, and was able to install, the latest version of Ubuntu using the 
"Install Inside of Windows" feature. The install was quite seamless, and 
I am very impressed with it. I now have a dual boot system with Ubuntu 
and my Windows XP still very much intact, and I didn't need to have an 
anxiety attack to get it that way. LOL!.

I am having a couple of problems, however. The main one right now is 
that my speech with Orca is very very sluggish at times, sometimes 
taking anywhere from a second or even more from the time I press a key 
to the time I hear any kind of feedback. I"m using, what I think, is 
Gnome speech and Espeak,which I believe comes set up standard with Orca. 
What can do to make this  more responsive? Would the fact that I used 
the Install Inside of Windows feature to set up my Ubuntu system have 
anything at all to do with this problem?

And, if I can get a good handle on that issue, my second biggest problem 
is that I stil have dial up internet, with no broadband at all in my 
immediate future. And, Ubuntu doesn't seem to recognize dial up modems? 
What would be the easiest way to fix this issue? I suppose if any 
downloading is necessary, I can do that while logged in to the XP side 
of my dual boot, but for now, that pretty much eliminates using any kind 
of automatic download/updating ability or tools directly through Ubumtu..

Any instructions or pointers to any good documentation, especially if 
the documentation is aimed towards Linux/Ubuntu beginners, would be very 
much appreciated here.

Thanks.

~Ann