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In cyberspace, there are no traffic cops!Sep 08 '00 Write an essay on this topic.On the internet there's no pesky cops waiting around bends or over hills trying to catch you speeding down the highway. Online you can go just as fast as you want - or at least as fast as your connection will go! Selecting a good ISP. The first point at which you can increase the speed of your internet connection is an obvious one - pick a good ISP! All the tweaking of settings in the world won't do you a lick of good if your ISP just isn't cutting the mustard. Unfortunately, as with a lot of things in the world, you get what you pay for. Most of the larger ISP's tend to charge a higher subscription fee, but for that fee you get a better average connection speed, and much more reliable servers. With the smaller ISP's, it can be a bit of a hit and miss affair. Some will provide great service for a much cheaper fee, others will provide only a bare minimum of service. My advice in looking for an ISP is to ask your net connected friends who they use, and whether they'd recommend them. That's how I found my ISP, and they're of the second variety - cheap but very good service. When deciding on your ISP, you need to take into consideration just how much you're willing to spend per month. If you have plenty of money, then a cable connection is probably a good choice. They're significantly faster than a dialup modem, and usually a lot more reliable too. However, as most PC's these days tend to come with a standard 56K dialup modem, that's usually what most people will aim for. However, be sure to ask the ISP you're considering whether or not you'll be able to CONNECT at 56K. If they tell you no, look elsewhere! The ISP may try to tell you that there's not a lot of difference between 56 and 33.6 - but believe me, there is! The Netscape trap. A lot of computer 'experts' will try and tell you that 'real' net users all use Netscape. This is quite frankly a crock. Anyone who actually knows what they're talking about will tell you that Netscape is generally more buggy than Internet Explorer. It also has an extremely poor implementation of HTML contained within it - an implementation that does such stupid things as not displaying a page as best it can if there's for instance a faulty table tag in the code. If a webmaster accidentally leaves out a closing tag within a table, IE will do what it can to make the information in the table readable once the page has finished loading. Usually it does a pretty decent job, and the information is displayed roughly as it should be. Not so with Netscape! If there's a missing or malformed tag in a table with Netscape NOTHING BELOW THE TABLE WILL LOAD! The table itself is visible within the source code of the page, but the actual page will not load within your browser. I've seen various 'experts' try and pass off this glaring fault in Netscape with an excuse like, "Well, IE just encourages shoddy HTML programming!" Bah! There's a million reasons why errors could be in that page, and we're just supposed to accept that Netscape won't display the page and be happy? Another area in which Netscape will hit your download speeds is in it's hidden spying tool. Yup, Netscape spies on your browsing habits without your knowledge. How this isn't a massive issue is beyond me, as programs that have done similar things in the past have been slammed by many sources, including the conventional media in some instances. I've heard rumours that it records every page you visit and every file you download back to Netscape HQ, but I personally doubt that is true, and cannot verify it myself. I can however verify that Netscape does try and report back to base anytime the program crashes for some reason. I managed to catch it in the act one day, when after having run Netscape, and having it crash on me (*gasp* What a surprise!), the reporting program loaded in the background, unbeknownst to me. Then I noticed that some of my other programs weren't responding either. So I gave it the three fingered salute (ctrl-alt-delete ;-)) to see what else had died on me. For some reason a Netscape thing was still shown as being loaded.. So I swapped over to that, and lo-and-behold, it's trying to send off information to Netscape! Included was my machine specs, including CPU, Windows version and update information, and the relevant version of Netscape. Well, I quickly put paid to that little trick and shut it down. Needless to say, I wasn't impressed, and haven't loaded Netscape since. Do you have problems successfully downloading files? If you're like me, you'll occasionally want to download something. Be it an MP3 file, a game demo or the latest nifty application for your PC, they all have to be downloaded somehow. Usually, things will go smoothly, you'll download your file, and everything will be fine. But if you've been using the internet for long, you're bound to have run into the dreaded incomplete download problem. Incomplete downloads can occur for any number of reasons - perhaps your ISP had a temporary hiccup and lost connection to the net. Perhaps the server the file is on had a hiccup. Perhaps some server somewhere in between you and the file server had a hiccup. Perhaps your connection died completely. Perhaps the download link is just being flogged to death by thousands of other net users, in any case, it results in the same thing - a useless file. So what can you do? There's a couple of things you can do. Firstly, if the file is stored on a closer server, as well as the 'original' server, you can try and download it from there instead, as it may be faster from there (this practice of storing files on extra alternate servers if known as 'mirroring' the file) Secondly, you can download a special program that allows you to resume broken downloads, saving you the hassle of having to download the entire file again. Programs such as GoZilla! ( www.gozilla.com ) can carry out this task effortlessly, including automatically resuming broken downloads without any extra effort by you. After you install it, all you need to do to download files is click the file you want and select where you want to save it as normal. Then let GoZilla do the rest! GoZilla is a free program, as it displays ads in the download window - they're stored locally from what I can tell, so they shouldn't impact on your download speed. GoZilla has saved me many times over, and it's one of the must have programs for me. Use a proxy server! If you're not viewing dynamic content (things like messageboards are what I call 'dynamic' content) then you'd probably do well to use a proxy server. Most ISP's will have one set up for their users to access the net through, and the difference in download speed they can make is astounding. In essence, a proxy server keeps a copy of frequently accessed pages - things like the main page at Yahoo for instance - on it's own hard drive, and sends out that copy to people requesting that page instead. As the connection speed from an ISP's proxy server to the end user is a significantly closer one, the speed is that much faster. If you use a proxy server, and the page you want to view is not up to date, as the proxy copy is 'stale' (old copy) you can just hit refresh a second time on your browser and the proxy will be over-ridden, and the new copy will be retrieved - which the proxy will then keep a copy of for future users. While this may not make a huge difference for most people, it can be of use if you're viewing a lot of static pages and swapping back and forth between static pages. Disable auto-updating software! Things like McAfee virus scan have automatic updating software programs, the automatically fetch the latest virus information from the net for you. This is great for people who are extra paranoid about viruses, but if it starts updating in the middle of a download, I can guarantee you won't be impressed! Do what I do, and select the option in McAfee to manually update your virus definitions. It's not a lot of extra work to tell it when to download the new data, and then you can plan when you want it to be using up your bandwidth, instead of having the scheduled time sneak up on you - as it has on me more than once! Email Auto-Checking Unless you absolutely have to know as soon as new emails arrived, don't bother running a program that checks for new email every X minutes. It doesn't use a lot of speed to do it, but when you can just load Outlook every half hour or so, why bother having a pop mail checker checking every 30 seconds? Don't laugh, I know people who have done that. ;-) Multiple Window Surfing If you're like me, you have a couple of places you like to check every time you're online. A quick and easy way to do this is to open two (or more if your PC can handle it) explorer windows, and have different sites loading at the same time. My usual practice is to have one page loading in the background while I read what I need to read on another page. Then when I've finished reading that, I can set that window to start loading something else (say the next message on a messageboard) and swap over to my second window, which has usually finished loading by that time. In this manner you're using your connection to it's full potential, instead of having it sit idle while you pore over the latest message on your favorite forum. ICQ? If your ICQ (or other instant message program) is in Do Not Disturb mode - and you really don't want to be disturbed - you may as well switch it off! ICQ likes to keep updating the status of itself very regularly (I'm unsure of the exact timeframe but it's around 20 second intervals) and if you don't want to be disturbed anyway, your ICQ may as well be off and be saving yourself that little bit of extra speed. The same goes for mIRC and other IRC programs - if you're just idling and not intending on paying attention, you may as well shut it down too! You'll gain a little extra speed out of shutting it down as well. Getting Paid To Surf? Be aware that many of the "Get Paid To Surf" programs can chew up a fair bit of your bandwidth if you've only got a slow dialup connection. While the difference may not be noticeable if you only run one program, obviously the more of them you run, the more downloading needs to be done to serve you new banner ads. Most companies now are only paying out peanuts anyway - I've spent less time at Epinions than I spent using most GPTS programs, and yet I've made more money here than I ever did with some of them - and I'm sure you could do the same! These are just some of my suggestions for speeding up your connection. There's plenty more ideas you can use, both more and less technical than the ones I've mentioned. You'd probably do well to check out some of the other Epinions in this category, if the World Wide Wait is getting you down! ;-)  |
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