If you're still stuck on a dial-up modem, you'll know how annoying it is to keep suffering dropped connections and have to dial-in again. Rascal is a simple program that helps avoid this problem by giving you constantly updated information about your dial-up session, including the name of the dial-up server, the IP address of the current connection, a calculation of your monthly connection costs so far, and a time log of how long you've been online for the current session, day, week, month, and year.

For most home users this will be enough but it may be worth upgrading to RascalPro for more serious users as it adds the ability to schedule when RascalPro starts monitoring, stop monitoring, or releases your connection. You can also define batch processes that should start when a connection is made or lost, and you have the ability to log these events and more to a file for later reference.

For anyone still on a modem, this is a brilliant little tool to prevent dropped connections.