One of the more frustrating aspects of computer usage in the Internet era are the times when your PC slows to a crawl for no apparent reason. Suddenly it seems as if the bits are passing through molasses as they travel from the Internet to your living room. The good news is that there are solutions to nearly every common Internet problem. While the problems vary depending on how you connect to the Internet, there are troubleshooting tactics and system tweaks you can use to optimize performance. And if all else fails, there are ways to make life more bearable on a slow Internet connection, using add-on tools that can speed up browsing and downloading under such conditions.Generic Problems
The first things to examine whenever system performance slows to a crawl are the tasks, or processes, your PC is running. No matter how fast of a CPU you have, running too many apps at once can slow everything down. Check running applications. Use the Windows Task Manager to check on hidden apps that could be starving your browser of precious time. Right click the Taskbar, select Task Manager, and click the Processes tab. You’ll see a list of every process (Windows calls them Images) running on your PC; you can sort the list by name, amount of CPU time, or memory usage. If you sort by CPU time and notice a couple programs trying to grab all the CPU, it’s a clue something has gone awry. If you identify an unknown program hogging all the CPU, you can stop it by right-clicking the name and selecting End Process. But be careful: accidentally killing a valid Windows process may cause other problems, requiring a reboot to fix. Check the drivers. You also may be overloading the network pipe. For example, if you’re using a dial-up connection, you likely won’t be able to watch the latest YouTube video while downloading email. When you notice performance deterioration, make sure your system has the latest network and modem drivers. These are often automatically updated by Microsoft Update (see www.microsoft.com/athome/security/update/msupdate_keep_current.mspx), but if you know your modem or network card model, it doesn’t hurt to check the manufacturer’s Web support site for updates.
Physical Network Problems & Troubleshooting Tips
Dial-up connections use the same basic technology: a modem connected to a phone line. But there are a number of broadband technologies (DSL [Digital Subscriber Line], cable TV, and fixed wireless), each with its own causes of performance degradation. Start any diagnosis of suspected network problems by getting quantitative data. There are a number of Web sites for performance testing; one of the best is at www.speedtest.net. It presents users with a world map of various test points relative to your location (which it does a good job of deducing from your Internet address), providing a convenient way to check speed against a number of servers. Speedtest.net remembers your PC from session to session, recording all your tests to a database to allow comparisons of results over time. Try testing at different times over several days. If you see results coming in below the rated speed of your service, it’s time to investigate. Depending on your specific connection type, there are a number of quick things to check when troubleshooting degraded Internet performance. Dial-up. A slow connection is often caused by a poor phone circuit. For example, dialing in from a new house in the suburbs, with new wiring all the way to the phone central office, will likely approach the theoretical maximum of 56Kbps (kilobits per second), while connections from older homes or rural areas may be lucky to reach 28.8Kbps. If your dial-up connection is slow, start by redialing or changing your access number. Persistently poor connections may be due to bad home wiring or too many line splitters between the wall jack and your PC. Make sure wiring is as short as possible. Broadband DSL. DSL circuits are dedicated to your location, so you should get the full-advertised bandwidth.However, they require special line filters if a phone is used on the same line. If your connection is slow, isolate wiring problems by unplugging all phones and fax machines, connecting your DSL modem to the wall socket, and retesting your connection. If the speed improves, you may have a bad line filter or too many splitters on the same line. Put your DSL modem on a dedicated phone line, if possible. Broadband cable. Cable TV circuits are shared with other homes in your neighborhood perhaps as many as 50 so download rates vary and are usually slower during prime time. Signal problems on cable circuits should be visible on your television, particularly on local channels (e.g. 2 to 12), and generally require a service call to correct. If your television signal looks good, try checking the speed at off-peak hours to see if your neighbors are hogging bandwidth. Wireless. Fixed wireless uses a portion of the broadcast spectrum to transmit to a stationary receiver. Signal strength can affect download speed and depends on placement of the receiver in relation to the antenna. Try moving the receiver to different locations. If the best location isn’t close to your PC, many wireless companies offer modules that can route the connection to other locations over electrical wiring. If none of these do-it-yourself solutions works, call your service provider to see if it can isolate the problem.Home Network Changes
Beyond your ISP (Internet service provider), Internet connection slowdown can also result from problems on your home network. If you don’t share your Internet connection (most dial-up users), you can skip this section. Wireless technology, also known as Wi-Fi, operates on a portion of the radio spectrum also used by many cordless phones and microwave ovens.
Within this spectrum, Wi-Fi routers run on one of 11 channels. If you live in close quarters such as an apartment building, a neighbor’s router could be configured to run on the same channel as yours, causing interference. If you notice a slowdown, use your router’s Web configuration page to try a different channel; your PC will automatically find the new channel. Cordless 2.4GHz phones operate over the same frequencies as Wi-Fi, so you’ll likely notice a slowdown or lost connection when the phone is in use. Either position the phone base station and wireless router as far from each other as possible or get a phone that runs on the 900MHz or 5.8GHz band. To get a detailed look at what is going on in the Wi-Fi ether, MetaGeek has a great gadget called Wi-Spy (www.metageek.net). It’s a USB key with sophisticated software that analyzes and graphically charts interference, quickly identifying any problems.
Occasionally the default network settings from your ISP can cause a slowdown. All Internet applications use DNS (domain name system) servers to look up the Web addresses of sites you access. When a broadband router connects to the ISP, it picks up addresses for the DNS servers and passes these along to your PC. If these servers are slow, changing to an OpenDNS server can alleviate the bottleneck. Details on how to start using OpenDNS are available at www.opendns.com/start. If all else fails, reboot your modem and router. This ensures the router picks up the latest configurations and can often clear up problems.
Browser Configuration Changes
Tweaking some browser settings can also help improve Internet connection performance. The simplest change is to increase the size of your Internet cache, or Temporary Internet Files in Internet Explorer parlance. Your browser keeps copies of pages you visit, including the graphical content, in the cache. When you revisit a page that has been cached, your browser looks for elements that haven’t changed since your last visit and uses the local copies instead of redownloading. Given the enormity of today’s hard drives, most browsers have conservative defaults for cache size, usually less than 50MB. Bumping this up to 100 to 250MB can help. In Internet Explorer, select Tools, Internet Options and click the General tab. Under Temporary Internet Files, click the Settings button. Enter a new amount of disk space used for the cache. If you’re on a very slow link, you can also to have the browser block most bandwidth hogs, including images, Java applets, and ads. Firefox offers the most flexibility in controlling what is displayed, with settings contained on the Options:Content tab. Internet Explorer can be configured by selecting Tools, Internet Options, clicking the Advanced tab, and scrolling down to the Java and Multimedia sections where you can check or uncheck a series of boxes to control whether various multimedia elements display. Unwanted pop-up windows are another source of frustration on slow links. Internet Explorer 7 comes with a pop-up blocker add-on. Firefox also comes with a free add-on, Adblock Plus. Adblock and other Firefox addons are available by selecting the Addons menu and clicking the Get Extensions button.
System Configuration Changes
Windows has a number of network parameters defined in the system Registry. The default values provide good performance, but they are not always optimal. While modifying the Registry is not for the faint of heart, Cable Nut (www.cablenut.com) provides a simple interface for changing the relevant parameters. Cable Nut includes a number of preset configurations for various connection types and can back up and restore previous Registry settings, should you need to back out of any changes.
Tools
A number of ISPs and third party products attempt to accelerate dial-up connections by using compression on different downloaded elements such as text and graphics. With these high-speed, dial-up services, the ISP runs an acceleration server that acts as an intermediary between your PC and Web servers.
The acceleration server uses its broadband connection to fetch and cache pages you request and then compresses the data before sending it to your PC, where it is decompressed by a small client program running on your PC. While many data types used on the Internet are already highly compressed, much is not. Depending on the page, these accelerated services often load more than three times faster than an unaccelerated dial-up account. If your ISP doesn’t offer high-speed service, several third parties provide equivalent functionality usable with any account (see the sidebars on this page for lists of ISPs and software). Be aware that most of the client only products, such as Accelerate (accelerate.webroot-software-inc.qarchive.org) or Net Accelerator (www.programurl.com/net-accelerator.htm), really just automate the tweaking of Windows network settings, similar to what CableNut allows you to do by hand, offering little extra value. Another way to increase your online efficiency is by using offline reading tools. You can configure email clients such as Outlook and Thunderbird to download all new mail and disconnect, letting you read and reply to mail offline. Both IE7 and Firefox offer RSS (Really Simple Syndication) news-reading add-ons that can download content from your favorite blogs or other RSS-aware sites for later perusal, similar in function to a number of third-party readers such as Newz Crawler (www.newzcrawler.com) or Feed-Demon (www.newsgator.com/NGOLProduct.aspx?ProdId=FeedDemon). Firefox and IE6 also have a “work offline” mode (available from the File menu) that allows you to browse previously visited pages; however, this feature has been eliminated in IE7 in preference of the more powerful RSS subscriptions that automatically download new content without having to manually access the site.
Intermittent Internet connection problems are an unpleasant reality, but there are a number of techniques and tools you can use to solve most basic problems and fine-tune your connection. For those stuck with slow dial-up links, high-speed services are available that provide noticeable improvement, although they still fall short of even the slowest broadband service. Use of offline reading software, coupled with simple changes in usage habits, can also greatly reduce the frustration of working with a slow connection.
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