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Pros and Cons Of Connection Tinkering!Jul 31 '00 Write an essay on this topic.If speeding up your Internet connection were easy, I'd be a millionaire! Through my years of tinkering with settings and programs, I have come up with the following that you may find useful in your endeavor. First Place I Started The modem, its settings, both strings and advanced property settings, and the correct and current drivers can help in improving your connection speed and throughput of data. Search out your modem manufacturer for updated drivers. Don't settle for a Windows generic driver! Many times these drivers are just that, generic; they usually don't take advantage of your modems capabilities. If you can't find the manufacturer, then go for the maker of the chipset. This can be sometimes be found in Windows 98 by going to the Control Panel, Modem, clicking the Diagnostics tab, highlighting your modem and clicking "More Info". Here you'll at least get a hint on your chipset and driver version. A quick search on the many search engines or driver sites will yield just what you're looking for, an updated driver. I have noticed a change from connecting 60% of the time, at no more than 44K, to connecting at 48-50K 85% of the time by updating my drivers for my Lucent based chipset three times over the past two months. Increasing Browser Cache Size How does it work? When you visit a site for the first time, the contents of the page are saved locally to your hard drive, including but not limited to, graphics, sound, and HTML. On your next visit to the site the contents of your cache are compared to the page you're trying to load and any unchanged documents or graphics are loaded directly from your hard drive and not through your connection. Netscape by default will only compare the contents "Once per session" but this can be changed through preferences. For IE its default is "Automatically". As you continue to visit sites the old data is flushed out and replaced with the new. As you can see from the above, increasing the size can be beneficial. I have found that once you surpass the "Sweet Spot" in cache size, the opposite is true. In this case "Bigger" is not "Better". No longer will weeding through Megabytes of cache files be quicker than actually loading the page. I Use and Recommend · A cache file size of 10 Megabytes for Netscape and 15 Megabytes for Internet Explorer. I am able to run a larger cache size efficiently on IE for reasons unbeknown to me. Anything larger than 10 on Netscape leads to slow retrieval. · If you have two drives, place your cache on the fastest uncompressed drive. · Experiment with what works best for you. It won't hurt you or your computer! ;) Pros: Helps when loading frequently visited sites. Cons: It does nothing when loading a site never visited and too large of a cache can be detrimental to browsing speed. Use of "Net Boosters" Many free programs are available to change the default TCP/IP and Dial-up settings in your registry supposedly for the better. I have had no success experimenting with these though but it's only fair I mention them. I have found it best to leave these as is. I have read many horror stories of programs manipulating these settings and throwing their connections in a tizzy. Unless you are confident with using these programs and assured of reverting to the original Windows settings in case of disaster, leave these alone! Other forms of boosters come in the form of download managers that claim to increase you downloads by as much as 300% by downloading the same file through different servers. The one I tried was Download Accelerator Plus. I saw very little difference in download times and the interface wasn't very intuitive. Both free and shareware programs are available, should you be adventurous, and can be found here or your favorite shareware depot. http://www.3drage.com/tweaks/networking/ Should you decide to play with any of these, remember to back-up your registry files! Pros: May improve some aspects of overall speed with online gaming. Cons:You may wish you never screwed around with these settings! Disable The Loading of Images · By choosing to do this in your browser preferences, you will notice a great improvement in page loading. Pros: This can cut back on load time since in most cases, at least 85% of page size can consist of images. Cons: This takes away the enjoyment of surfing I think. Kind of hard to do some online shopping without pictures! Or pretty red rating bubbles or Epinions logos! ;) Disabling Ad Banners · Disabling just ad banners from loading by using one of the many programs available specifically for this purpose. Many are free. Pros: I recommend this choice over blocking graphics entirely since you'll get the whole page minus the ads. Cons:Can cut into revenue that keep sites like Epinions in business. If you can't see it, you can't click on it! I use ad blocking sparingly and I mainly use it to keep down my usage during peak Internet access on my home network. Hey! I sometimes enjoy clicking on banner ads! I know. I'm strange. The Bottom Line Downloading of files or web pages is most influenced by your connection speed. Using DSL or Cable modems you're not as concerned with any of the above unless you really want to push the limit! Don't be suckered into believing that your speed can be increased to astronomical proportions. Sometimes network settings can be tweaked to send larger packet sizes but for the most part you won't notice any substantial change in speed or download times. But like I've said in the past, this is my opinion on the subject and your mileage may vary!  |
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