AS LEO SAYS, MUCH OF THE SLOWDOWN IS AD & SPYWARE, BUT ADDITIONAL RAM MEMORY WILL CURE MOST ILLS, FACTORY SUPPLIED 128 / 256 MB JUST WONT GET IT. YOU GOTTA HAVE A MINIMUM OF 1GB, IT HAS CURED PROBLEMS ON EVERY SLOW MACHINE I HAVE WORKED ON.
Posted by: J F REES JR at October 7, 2008 10:06 AM
A friend recently told me that the number of websites I have on my desktop is slowing down my computer. I will admit I use the desktop instead of "Favorites," because they are right there within my vision. Thanks! Susan Lauer
Posted by: Susan Lauer at October 7, 2008 10:41 AM
Even with a full-bandwidth connection the problem can still be on the other end of the pipe: overloaded servers at the web site you are visiting may not be able to fill your pipe as fast as your connection can empty it.
Posted by: Howard B. Evans, Jr. at October 7, 2008 11:33 AM
Leo,
First day on the site and really like it. However, I did the SpeakEasy test and it gave me results in kbps (2577 down and 321 up). That did not give me much for comparison. Is there a conversion or is this on another level altogether.
Thanks!
Posted by: Tom at October 7, 2008 12:18 PM
[quote]: I did the SpeakEasy test and it gave me results in kbps (2577 down and 321 up)[/quote]
That seems a bit strange indeed, but is due to the provider; I have the same: download is around 15 MB, but upload is around 1/9 of it; goes with the offered "package" apparently, although I still would like it going both ways at the same speed. So Leo, is there any other reason which may affect the upload speed ? LRK
Not sure I understand the concern. Most DSL connections are actually ADSL, meaning for "asymmetric". That means that the download speed is typically much faster than the upload speed since people typically download much more than the upload. (Mine are symmetrical because I have what's called a dedicated T-1, not DSL).
- Leo 08-Oct-2008
Posted by: lrk at October 7, 2008 12:46 PM
To start with talking about your Internet speed in terms of megabits/sec is very misleading. The fact is that your download speed is in megabytes/sec. Let's just say you are on uTorrent. Your speeds will be shown in megabytes/sec. Megabits is misleading because you think you're really getting a tremendous amount of speed when in fact you really are not. You need to divide megabits by eight and then consider the overhead and the best way to divide is by 10 so a 5000 megabit/sec speed would really be divided by 10 or 500 megabytes/sec. My Internet connection at its top speed is 1.7 megabytes/sec which is more than necessary for most users. People are a lot more impressed if they see a number like 11,700. Any older computer way back several years will take advantage of these newer faster speeds. If you are getting a speed around 500 megabytes/sec or better you will have quite sufficient bandwidth to do pretty much anything that the home user might want to do with the possible exception of transferring very large files or using bit torrent programs. The other issue is that your upload speed will be substantially slower than your download speed. My upload speed is around 350/megabytes per second with the download speed of 1.7 megabytes per second. Do not expect to get the same upload speed as your download speed.
Hopefully this helps.
Posted by: Lorne Babcock Sr. at October 7, 2008 2:18 PM
In addition to PC Tools Spyware Doctor, I use PC Pitstop Optimize to keep my 8 year-old Pentium III generic desktop running in fine form! (600MHz, 768MB RAM, running XP-SP2) I scrounged-up some more PC133 RAM on eBay, and will bump "Freddy" to 1.5GB along with a $20 dose of USB 2.O any day now. It's true... more RAM is the most effective way to add speed to your system. A hefty video dispay adapter, with plenty of on-board memory, also works wonders.
Posted by: Gil Strachan at October 7, 2008 5:28 PM
Contrary to what many believe, adding more ram will "not" increase the speed of your internet connection. They have nothing to do with each other.
Posted by: Lorne Babcock Sr. at October 7, 2008 8:34 PM
Well, obviously, we're forgetting one major factor in this question: is the original question referring to the OS and applications running slowly (my guess from the mention of "my computer" there) or referring to the network speed appearing sluggish.
The difference can be hard to explain to a technologically-challenged person, but it boils down to these questions:
1. Do you mean it takes a lot of time to start Office/Internet Explorer/whatever? or
2. Do you mean it takes a lot of time for web pages to show up, downloads to complete, etc?
Leo's answer here covers the latter (in excellent detail), but not the former (though there are other articles here that do!), and for that case, some suggested answers would help:
- running anti-virus/anti-spyware (just one of each!), which you should already be doing;
- running fewer applications at the same time (including some system-tray applications, too -- a few of them can be surprisingly resource-intensive (Google Desktop Search, I'm looking at you));
- finally, adding more RAM often tends to solve perceived (or actual) sluggishness.
As a last resort, reinstalling the operating system from scratch (losing all settings and data in the process, so back up first!) will return the computer to its original glory, which 99% of the time is faster than a "well-worn" OS (to varying degrees), after which anti-virus and anti-spyware should keep it in decent condition for a long-ish period (on the order of years if you don't install too many things).
Either way, the important point is to know which we're talking about -- the computer speed very rarely affects download speeds negatively in my experience, and vice-versa.
Posted by: Octav at October 7, 2008 9:04 PM
Check out www.DSLReports.Com which has not only speed tests, but tuning tweak suggestions based upon tests you can run there.
Asymmetric speeds (higher download than upload) are not unexpected, in fact, they are normal for most home connections. Most home connections are by the design of the ISP setup this way.
Icons on your desk top have no real bearing upon the speed of your computer, except as outlined in an earlier article on this site... and they certainly do not affect your network speeds.
As a simple counter example, I have a 500Mhz 512MB notebook from 1999 that sits in my home, and it is quite capable of making as full utilization of my network connection (6-15Mb/sec down, depending upon some of the external load factors noted earlier) as my 1997 2Ghz 1.5GB dual processor system.
It is always interesting to use tools such as task manager (and others discussed on this site) to monitor your memory, cpu and network usage when running these sorts of tests... while it does not always tell you something, it can reveal the "oops, there's a CPU burner like the windows update deamon running in the background". ;-)
More likely is that your cable/dsl modem may be the issue if it is the older machine. I recently replaced mine (from 1999) and saw an immediate improvement (from about a 4Mb limit up to 10-15Mb burst speeds)... it had reached the end of its useful life, and it was a free upgrade as I don't own it, but rather rent it as a part of my monthly ISP bill.
All that said, if you are using an external/addon network card, it may be worth checking to see if it is a "16bit" or "32bit" card, and how much on card intellegence it has... it is possible, if you are seeing high CPU (near 100%) usage during your speed tests that a minor upgrade of that card might do much for your total bandwidth availablity, though it is unlikely to have much effect until you are already getting over 10Mb/sec or so. (Been there, done that.)
Posted by: Nicholas Gimbrone at October 8, 2008 7:26 AM
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AS LEO SAYS, MUCH OF THE SLOWDOWN IS AD & SPYWARE, BUT ADDITIONAL RAM MEMORY WILL CURE MOST ILLS, FACTORY SUPPLIED 128 / 256 MB JUST WONT GET IT. YOU GOTTA HAVE A MINIMUM OF 1GB, IT HAS CURED PROBLEMS ON EVERY SLOW MACHINE I HAVE WORKED ON.
Posted by: J F REES JR at October 7, 2008 10:06 AMA friend recently told me that the number of websites I have on my desktop is slowing down my computer. I will admit I use the desktop instead of "Favorites," because they are right there within my vision. Thanks! Susan Lauer
Posted by: Susan Lauer at October 7, 2008 10:41 AMEven with a full-bandwidth connection the problem can still be on the other end of the pipe: overloaded servers at the web site you are visiting may not be able to fill your pipe as fast as your connection can empty it.
Posted by: Howard B. Evans, Jr. at October 7, 2008 11:33 AMLeo,
Posted by: Tom at October 7, 2008 12:18 PMFirst day on the site and really like it. However, I did the SpeakEasy test and it gave me results in kbps (2577 down and 321 up). That did not give me much for comparison. Is there a conversion or is this on another level altogether.
Thanks!
[quote]: I did the SpeakEasy test and it gave me results in kbps (2577 down and 321 up)[/quote]
That seems a bit strange indeed, but is due to the provider; I have the same: download is around 15 MB, but upload is around 1/9 of it; goes with the offered "package" apparently, although I still would like it going both ways at the same speed. So Leo, is there any other reason which may affect the upload speed ? LRK
08-Oct-2008
To start with talking about your Internet speed in terms of megabits/sec is very misleading. The fact is that your download speed is in megabytes/sec. Let's just say you are on uTorrent. Your speeds will be shown in megabytes/sec. Megabits is misleading because you think you're really getting a tremendous amount of speed when in fact you really are not. You need to divide megabits by eight and then consider the overhead and the best way to divide is by 10 so a 5000 megabit/sec speed would really be divided by 10 or 500 megabytes/sec. My Internet connection at its top speed is 1.7 megabytes/sec which is more than necessary for most users. People are a lot more impressed if they see a number like 11,700. Any older computer way back several years will take advantage of these newer faster speeds. If you are getting a speed around 500 megabytes/sec or better you will have quite sufficient bandwidth to do pretty much anything that the home user might want to do with the possible exception of transferring very large files or using bit torrent programs. The other issue is that your upload speed will be substantially slower than your download speed. My upload speed is around 350/megabytes per second with the download speed of 1.7 megabytes per second. Do not expect to get the same upload speed as your download speed.
Hopefully this helps.
Posted by: Lorne Babcock Sr. at October 7, 2008 2:18 PMIn addition to PC Tools Spyware Doctor, I use PC Pitstop Optimize to keep my 8 year-old Pentium III generic desktop running in fine form! (600MHz, 768MB RAM, running XP-SP2) I scrounged-up some more PC133 RAM on eBay, and will bump "Freddy" to 1.5GB along with a $20 dose of USB 2.O any day now. It's true... more RAM is the most effective way to add speed to your system. A hefty video dispay adapter, with plenty of on-board memory, also works wonders.
Posted by: Gil Strachan at October 7, 2008 5:28 PMContrary to what many believe, adding more ram will "not" increase the speed of your internet connection. They have nothing to do with each other.
Posted by: Lorne Babcock Sr. at October 7, 2008 8:34 PMWell, obviously, we're forgetting one major factor in this question: is the original question referring to the OS and applications running slowly (my guess from the mention of "my computer" there) or referring to the network speed appearing sluggish.
The difference can be hard to explain to a technologically-challenged person, but it boils down to these questions:
1. Do you mean it takes a lot of time to start Office/Internet Explorer/whatever? or
2. Do you mean it takes a lot of time for web pages to show up, downloads to complete, etc?
Leo's answer here covers the latter (in excellent detail), but not the former (though there are other articles here that do!), and for that case, some suggested answers would help:
- running anti-virus/anti-spyware (just one of each!), which you should already be doing;
- running fewer applications at the same time (including some system-tray applications, too -- a few of them can be surprisingly resource-intensive (Google Desktop Search, I'm looking at you));
- finally, adding more RAM often tends to solve perceived (or actual) sluggishness.
As a last resort, reinstalling the operating system from scratch (losing all settings and data in the process, so back up first!) will return the computer to its original glory, which 99% of the time is faster than a "well-worn" OS (to varying degrees), after which anti-virus and anti-spyware should keep it in decent condition for a long-ish period (on the order of years if you don't install too many things).
Either way, the important point is to know which we're talking about -- the computer speed very rarely affects download speeds negatively in my experience, and vice-versa.
Posted by: Octav at October 7, 2008 9:04 PMCheck out www.DSLReports.Com which has not only speed tests, but tuning tweak suggestions based upon tests you can run there.
Asymmetric speeds (higher download than upload) are not unexpected, in fact, they are normal for most home connections. Most home connections are by the design of the ISP setup this way.
Icons on your desk top have no real bearing upon the speed of your computer, except as outlined in an earlier article on this site... and they certainly do not affect your network speeds.
As a simple counter example, I have a 500Mhz 512MB notebook from 1999 that sits in my home, and it is quite capable of making as full utilization of my network connection (6-15Mb/sec down, depending upon some of the external load factors noted earlier) as my 1997 2Ghz 1.5GB dual processor system.
It is always interesting to use tools such as task manager (and others discussed on this site) to monitor your memory, cpu and network usage when running these sorts of tests... while it does not always tell you something, it can reveal the "oops, there's a CPU burner like the windows update deamon running in the background". ;-)
More likely is that your cable/dsl modem may be the issue if it is the older machine. I recently replaced mine (from 1999) and saw an immediate improvement (from about a 4Mb limit up to 10-15Mb burst speeds)... it had reached the end of its useful life, and it was a free upgrade as I don't own it, but rather rent it as a part of my monthly ISP bill.
All that said, if you are using an external/addon network card, it may be worth checking to see if it is a "16bit" or "32bit" card, and how much on card intellegence it has... it is possible, if you are seeing high CPU (near 100%) usage during your speed tests that a minor upgrade of that card might do much for your total bandwidth availablity, though it is unlikely to have much effect until you are already getting over 10Mb/sec or so. (Been there, done that.)
Posted by: Nicholas Gimbrone at October 8, 2008 7:26 AMTo post a comment on "Do I need a new computer to keep up with my faster internet connection?", please return to that article's main page.