I got rid of windows (yay) and loaded rh8 and got the standard ppp-compress-21 not found and ppp0 messages in system logs ( First time in linux)

However if I go and google it comes back fine, and if I go further into a page say techguy for example its fine, but if I go anywhere else like yahoo mail or anything with large amounts of info and colours on the web pages it sits for ages and then times out. What do I need to tweak in rh to get it to go better. Much head banging going on when I realised my internal modem wasnt going to work!!!!
P.S linux isnt my operating system of choice, but its a good alternative!!!
I'm a unix sys admin by day, linux baby by night!!!