Abysmal broadband speed

davolente · Joined: Oct 04, 2003 Posts: 304 Location: Kent, UK

Here in the UK, I live in an area which has lousy ancient phone lines and the most I can expect is around half a meg; so that's the el-cheapo, unlimited package I have from my ISP. I can actually get near that speed, but normally only after an immediate re-boot. Invariably, the first boot-up of the day (be it in the morning or evening) gives me speeds of anything from half that down to less than a third (even slower sometimes!) and stays that way unless I re-boot straight away and it then perks up. I have queried this with my ISP but they want me to jump through so many hoops just to get things checked, it's untrue. I have already checked my end until I'm blue in the face. (Disconnected the third "bell" wire when I first moved in and changed an extension lead, which was originally causing a problem but that just made it consistently slow). I just got a standard reply initially which gave various things to check but I'm sure the majority wouldn't cause an intermittent problem. The speed would be permanently slow, I'm sure. I think it's an ISP problem. Any ideas whether I might be right? Why does a re-boot "cure" it?

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 1546 Location: Central FL, USA

Hey Dude, how's things in Jolly auld England?

Not so good in the broadband department, I guess?

Well, if your connection is coming to you via the old phone company, you may be in for many disappointments. All phone signals are Multiplexed, so many people can use the same phone lines. With a lot of people using the lines at the same time, voice travels OK, but data really takes a hit.
Some packets of data may have to resend a hundred times before it comes through correctly.

Cable is only slightly better. I have a Cable ISP with 5meg download rate, but at certain hours of the day, that can diminish some.

But, on the other side of the coin, if your computer is being a DOG, it won't be able to properly process data and your interpretation will be that your Broadband connection is failing, when maybe it really isn't.

We've spent hours and even days here telling people how to optimize their PC's for maximum performance. Most people don't even believe me when I say that I can double the performance of the average Windows computer.
(if I have about two to three hours at the keyboard)

In a nutshell, start by shutting down everything that you have running in the background. The worse offenders will be found in your Startup folder in MSCONFIG. Believe it or not, I have only two programs starting up on boot.
My AVG anti virus program and my UPS Monitor Program. That's really all I need. All those reminders, schedulers and updaters have NO place in a busy PC at all.

Next, you can gain a small amount of performance by shutting down all those obnoxious background Services, that windows installs.
I shut down about twenty on XP and almost 40 on Vista, without loosing any critical services that I need to do my daily business.
See the "Black Viper's" web site for a full list of Services and which ones can be "SAFELY" shut down, or put into Manual mode, so they only run when needed.

Then there's the RAM. Seldom seen and little understood, the ram is actually the very heart of your system performance.
All Programs run in the RAM, not from the hard drive.
( or, at least, that's the way it's supposed to work Wink

)
For top performance of any XP PC, you should have three gigs of ram.
For Vista (any version) your should have four gigs of ram.
DDR2, Dual Channel, is best.

Even with enough ram, Windows is designed to use space on the hard drive called a "SwapFile" on "PageFile" which it uses as space to supplement ram.
A hard drive may be as slow as 1/1000 the speed of the ram, so everything you can do in ram instead of the PageFile is to your advantage.

And then, since Windows is using Hard Drive space to supplement ram, it would stand to reason that you should keep your HD as clean and defragmented as possible.
I have my own PC and all my customers PC's set up for a Weekly (not weakly) HD maintenance routine.
That routine includes my own XPCleanup batch file and the Extended Windows Disk Cleanup program followed by a full defrag.
* always clean the garbage out of your HD before running Defrag.

OH, if only I could just jump in my Lear Jet and buzz over there. I'd have that PC up and running like a scalded dog, in no time at all.
Then we could stop by the local pub for a pint. Wink

Cheers Mate!
The Doctor Cool

PS: You said nothing about your PC or what version of OS you're running so we're left to to a lot of guessing.
What OS?
How much ram?
What CPU?
What HD?
And, anything else you can think of.

Philocalist · Posted: Tue Sep 29, 2009 1:00 pm Post subject:

Just thinking a little laterally here, but there may be a simpler solution to your problem that will almost certainly give you a much faster internet connection, and may even save you money to boot ... get a new mobile phone! The Orange network give you free home broadband with an Orange contract phone (up to 8MB, apparently), and there are similar offers through the likes of Carphone Warehouse, Phones4U etc.
I KNOW this can be a solution to the problem, as it was the end result for my daughter and her husband when they moved into the back of beyond, in deepest darkest Scotland!

micker377 · Joined: May 27, 2005 Posts: 994

Hey Doc:
I just had a problem with slow cable. For the last month or so, it was getting slower and slower. Finally on Sunday it stopped completely! The cable guy (no it wasn't Larry!), came out to check my signal to the modem (T.V. was O.K.). He found that the cable linked through my UPS was partially blocking the signal from the modem back to the cable IPS server. He bypassed the UPS for the 'net connection, and everything is fine! Back to full speed (10 Mb/s)!
No, I don't have the lightning problem like you do! I live in a "corner" house, and the overhead power lines pole is in my back yard. I have the "protection" of their top wire on the pole!

davolente · Joined: Oct 04, 2003 Posts: 304 Location: Kent, UK

Thanks folks. Should have mentioned that it's good old XP running on a pretty basic PC. Bit short on RAM at the mo' only having 768 megs - soon to be remedied. Had already done everything previously that the Doc suggested. Extraneous services shut down, start-up programs, etc. Everything is paired down to the bone, including using the "classic" appearance and setting properties to "best performance", so no real problems with the PC as it stands. That actually runs pretty well. It's quite perky, really, which makes me think that the intermittent broadband speed is an ISP problem, although, having said that, I got my max. speed first time up this evening, which is highly unusual. As I mentioned, I've pretty much resigned myself to re-boot virtually every time I want to use the PC to get the broadband speed up to as much as I can probably expect where I live. Ironically, I used to live in a more rural location and that used to be faster, as it was actually closer to the small local exchange! Doh! My neighbour, who has a different ISP, is also complaining bitterly about how slow his speed is, so it looks like a "not-spot" problem on the lines anyway, but why so intermittent?

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 1546 Location: Central FL, USA