Net surfing has become painfully slow for the last few days. I have Win98SE running on a 500 MHz AMD K-6 3D processor; 128 megs of RAM with 88% resources free; 20 Gig HD. FastAccess DSL. I spent 2 hours on the phone with them yesterday and we could find nothing amiss. My browser is IE 5.5. It takes a minute or so to get the IE window, then as IE loads, I get little pieces of the page over approximately 2 to 4 minutes; the same when I try to go to other URLs. I have run Norton Utilities and haven’t found anything that I think might be the problem. I have uninstalled several applications, hoping one of them might be the culprit. Any suggestions?
Step 1. Run some basic diagnostics. Scandisk your hard drive. Run a top notch virus scanner using the latest virus list. Defrag your hard drive. Clear out your temp dirs, your browser cache, etc.
Step 2. The real work. It sounds like you are not certain if the problem is your computer or your connection. Let’s clear this up. Set your browser’s home page to an html file on your computer. (Be sure it doesn’t contain remote icons or some such.) Close your browser and restart. Does it still take a long time? Try accessing other local html files. If these take a long time, it’s not your DSL connection. If they are quite fast, then you have the worst consumer nightmare of the 21st century. A bad DSL connection and your provider will probably go bankrupt before its fixed. (Unless it’s your local teleco, and then they’ll wait until all other DSL providers go bankrupt before they’ll fix it.) Check also if ftp is slow (use a real ftp program, not your browser). How’s your DNS setup? Sometimes that causes this kind of problems. Search the TechTV Call for Help pages. Search also the Google Usenet archives (formerly the DejaNews archive).
Step 3a. (It’s a local problem.) Check to see what’s running at start up, what DLL’s are being loaded, etc. Try System Tools->System Information. The menu item Tools->System Configuration Utility will show you the progs. loaded at startup. The main System Information window will show you DLLs and such. Don’t change/remove a thing unless you have completely verified that it won’t otherwise cause problems.
Step 4a. Get a real operating system. I know you don’t want to hear that, but it’s the truth.
FtG aka GLP
How bad is DSL customer service? People switch from DSL to Cable Co. broadband for improved service. The mind boggles.
Thanks, ftg, for your suggestions. I am working on them. The first one about cleaning out files and browser cache and scandisking and defragging has already been done.
And your idea of a real OS would be…Linux, maybe???
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- Um, no. Linux eliminates Windows problems the same way that moving to the North Pole frees you from having to mow the lawn.
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- Linux is not a substitute for anything Windows, in most cases. It’s a cheaper operating system that does a lot less. Linux sidesteps a lot of potential problems by simply not doing many of the things Windows does automatically - things that you take for granted. Like hardware support: although everything you now are running has Windows drivers available, those same pieces of hardware may well not have Linux drivers available at all. Like, for instance, your modem, in which case having Linux [or any other OS] won’t help you one iota. (Linux proponents have this very common peculiar habit of forgetting to tell you all the things Windows does that Linux doesn’t do)
Linux simply does not have anywhere near the same level of refinement as a consumer product as MS Windows does. That’s why you can’t go to Wal-Mart and buy software applications that run in Linux. - All versions of Windows have constant problems, and none of them ever work (he-he). Well, -no, , not really, but all have potential problems that can be impossible to back out of. You can search on any version and find people claiming that “it never works”. ~ I would personally reformat and reinstall Windows, get the most recent update, and then reinstall every application in order of importance while testing to see which makes the whole parade slow down. You might find out after all that even if you reinstall everything you have on it now, nothing does (if you install something and then uninstall it, your registry doesn’t necessarily get returned to its exact previous condition, so problems can get introduced and not removed). - MC
If you search for ‘slow’ around in About This Message Board, youll have some more thing you can try. We talk about slow connections there.
Id try another phone number though, my ISP always gives me the fastest one for the type of modem I have. Maybe you are calling one of their old 56k numbers?
I am not sure if anyone suggested clearing the cache in your browser, that can make a tremendous difference, even for broadband users like myself
On question I have is : does every other app on your computer load this slowly? If so - it’s a computer problem, not a connection problem.
If you determine it’s a connection problem, give BellSouth (that’s your ISP, correct?) technical support a call. They’re pretty helpful.
If you are just talking about the past couple of days, I’ve been having the same problem. It gets somewhat better very early in the morning. ??