Like everyone else, when I make my travels about the Internet, sometimes things move faster than others.
I know this is a dumb question, but spell it out for me anyway:
– When it’s slower, what’s happening to make it so? Simply more users?
– With the computer and connection I have now (neither one much to speak of), are there things I can do to improve my Internet surfing speeds?
I can help with the second question. One thing that can help is getting an ad blocker. Proximitron works great. I have at guard, but it got bought by Norton and modified for Norton Internet Security 2000.
Well, less bandwidth is available between your IP and that you are transfering from. This can result from more users, more bandwidth per user, how your connection is currently routed, and the maximum bandwidth from the distributing site. A lot of traffic can also increase packet collisions… that is, the data gets damaged or lost en route to your box, your computer detects it, and requests that the sending unit retransmit. Get a lot of these requests, and performance takes a major hit.
Well, you can make modifications to you packet size… there are a number of programs on the 'Net that purport to allow significant increases in data transfer independant of hardware involved. How effective they are, I hesitate to say, as I’ve never used one personally.
Agreed about the ad blocker. I user Junkbuster myself, which also serves as a proxy server for Janelle’s computer.
http://www.junkbuster.com
Another suggestion if your computer can handle it would be to increase the cache size of your browser (memory and disk) and change the frequency of cache refreshing.
If by connection you are referring to your hardware, you may want to switch providers if you can. A different provider which isn’t sharing the bandwidth with as many people, and may be practicing its own caching may be the answer.
You may also want to make certain you are connecting at the highest speed possible for your setup. If you are using a phoneline and a 56K modem, one problem may be a noisy line. This is difficult to ascertain, and, from personal experience, difficult to convince Bell of, but can be fixed. One test for this is to switch jacks since often times the corrosion is at an exposed jack in a moist area.
Couple more minor things.
Occasionally it helps to refresh a page that doesn’t seem to be loading. And, if you are sharing you connection over a household network, you might want to check to see what other people are doing on their machine (I keep having that problem) 
As for why the net is slow.
Hm. Problems would include - major world events, stupid backhoe users, your ISP having problems, hardware/software issues on your machine (covered above)…
These sites can give an interesting view on the state of the internet:
http://www.internettrafficreport.com
Enjoy.
What you could do also to allow your machine to run a little faster while surfing is to go to (in IE4-5) tools>Internet options>clear temporary Internet files. Press delete all. After you do that you can click on clear history and clear the history. After that your machine should run a little faster while on the internet. I also would run defrag on your computer. You can find Defrag by going to start>Programs>Accesories>system tools. After you defrag your machine will run a little faster also.
When it’s slower, what’s happening to make it so? Simply more users?
Sometimes. But you are going thru a lot of computers & routers & hubs on the net & they all have to be fine. Try howthingswork.com search for ‘internet’
– With the computer and connection I have now (neither one much to speak of), are there things I can do to improve my Internet surfing speeds?
What computer? What type of modem? What ISP? AOL?
Another question:
I’m thinking of switching to a free internet service that makes you view ads…can you use an ad-blocking program with that or will it gum everything up?
In terms of ad-blocking software I can only recommend one. I’ve tried the others and have found that WebWasher by Seimens is far and the away the best. It’s easy to set up and speeds up surfing time enormously. Besides, you’ll never see an ad or pop-up again.
http://www7.trans-it.net/de/index.htm
If you try it make sure to disable it when trying to read the message boards, click the ‘W’ in the system tray, it wants to screen out Cecil for some reason.
Achtung!!!
I accidentally linked to the German language version. Here’s the english:
http://www7.trans-it.net/index.htm
Hope this helps…
For the following explanation I will assume that you are surfing to the same website from the same computer at different times resulting in different performance. If you’re switching computers or getting different performance from different web sites then there are a few dozen things that fit into the equation.
The simplest way to look at this is to equate the interent with a road system. At 2 a.m. when no one is out on the roads you can fly. Try the same roads at rush hour and you crawl along.
Bandwidth can equate to the number of lanes on the road. Your 56K modem is like a single lane road leading from your house to your ISP. At that ‘intersection’ the ISP has a 4-lane road out the back. At some point it merges onto the expressway with 8-lanes. Just as in real driving conditions these lanes can get jammed-up slowing everyone’s progress.
Now imagine you are going to McDonald’s for a burger (equivalent to going to Merril Lynch for your stock quote). If you’re the only guy around you get your food quickly. If it’s lunchtime the restaurant has to deal with each person before you adding time to your ‘stay’ before you head back home with your food (data).
Improving your connection or computer are the most obvious. Also, not all ISP’s are created equally. In my example above I said the ISP has ‘4-lanes’ out its backdoor. In reality they can be all over the place from ‘1-lane’ to ‘8-lanes’. In general (not necessarily always) you’ll pay more for the ISP’s who are closer to the ‘expressway’ with ‘wide roads’ that merge with it.
Not sure about the other stuff (ad blockers) the other posters are suggesting.
This is right, but I wonder if more background would help.
Possibly the OP is wondering about the speed because, hey, it’s all electricity, and doesn’t that move at the speed of light? In fact, most networking is based on the notion of packets of data. The basic idea is that you can share a network if you take a chunk o’ data, slap an address on it, and transmit it. Machines on the network examine the packets going by, and accept the ones with their address on it. So any message you transmit may end up in many different packets. They may not even arrive in the same order you sent them. But eventually they all get reassembled and decoded into your original message.(Huge amounts of detail omitted both for clarity and because I no longer remember any of it.)
This whole system gets less efficient as the network gets congested. There’s less and less space for a system to launch a packet. Pretty much like trying to get on the on-ramp of a busy highway. Packets can “collide” which means that they have to be retransmitted. If you have to retransmit packets, the throughput goes way down. In a big network, like the internet, there are probably other factors – you may get routed through paths with more or less bandwidth. Noise may make your packet undeliverable.
‘I’m thinking of switching to a free internet service that makes you view ads…can you use an
ad-blocking program with that or will it gum everything up?’
That depends on which one you are using. freewwweb doesn’t have ads & I think you are in California, so you might try them as they have local dialups here.
To make pages you only want to read and to block most ads…simply turn off your images. The page will load much faster.
Side note…If all you want is text when you surf…you might want to try Lynx…A text only browser.
http://lynx.browser.org/
About free ISPs: they can get very busy as well, if they are very well known, such as NetZero. Note: ad blockers do not work with adware prodcuts, such as GoZilla.
There a hacks of Netzero that keep the ads out. However, every 30 minutes you still have to do something to stay online.