I need an idiot proof one. When my connection is slow I’d like to at least be able to say that there is nothing wrong with my line, etc. Whether it’s just server congestion. I don’t know how to ping stuff or do any of that whatever it is. Any recommendations.
Chances are, there is “nothing wrong with your line”.
Cable users are just like users on a network, and the cable “modem” you have is just an ethernet connection.
You are suffering slow down because your “network” is congested with users. The cable company has too many people (for your sake) hooked up on the same network.
Also, most cable systems have uploads limited to 56k or 112K, since some cable uploads are actually done through copper telephone wire, not the coaxial cable you would think of.
Here’s a couple of bandwidth speed check sites.
http://computingcentral.msn.com/internet/speedtest.asp
http://www.2wire.com/services/bandwidth.asp
These can only measure the throughput between your box and their site, but if one particular site seems slow to you, this might help pin down whether the bottleneck is on your end or theirs.
If you’re using Win32, open a command prompt and try these two commands:
ping domain.com
tracert domain.com
where domain.com is the domain name you’re interested in. Ping will give you round-trip timing. Tracert (trace route) will show you the actual router hops between your machine and the destination. Both provide some useful trivia, but won’t specifically answer “is my line bad”.
This sounds like what you might be looking for.
http://64.29.193.182/internet/default.asp
Here’s a ZDnet article that’s a nice introduction to the process of Resolving Web Bottlenecks.