Hi Guys, I'm a bit stumped. Sometimes my connection will have unexpected slowdowns, right to a trickle. I have a 1.5mbps broadband cable connection. I am not networked. I have attempted reinstalling the network card and also rollingback/updating drivers, none of which worked. I have a found a temporary fix where if I pull out the mains cable from the back of the modem and plug in 30 seconds later I get good speed for 5 minutes or so before it trickles to a halt. I've tried various anti-virus checks and spyware checks and they have mostly come up clean. Anything they did find (mostly just tracking cookies) was deleted immediately and the problem is still here. Any ideas/advice would be great. Cheers, Sam

First you need to determine if the issue is with the sites you are viewing or your ISP. Go to the link below and test your thruput. The site will measure in kbps. Divide that by 1024 to get the mbps, which is your 1.5mbps connection. http://www.pcpitstop.com/internet/ If you are connected using cable internet you need to know how that works. A pool of subscribers in you area are all connected to what is called a node. All subscribers in the same node SHARE the same bandwidth. This means that if many are using the internet to download at the same time the speed will slow down. Sometimes considerably.

Hi, I went to the PCPitstop site and the site wouldn't load, due to the connection problem. I unplugged my modem and loaded the website again and completed the test very quickly, and it gave ample results: Last Result: Download Speed: 1463 kbps (182.9 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 179 kbps (22.4 KB/sec transfer rate) Latency: 16 ms So, I waited a few minutes, watched a video on youtube and went back and did the test again. This time it took a minute to get started and was slightly choppier than before graphics-wise: Last Result: Download Speed: 752 kbps (94 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 151 kbps (18.9 KB/sec transfer rate) Latency: 16 ms I am now doing a third test which has frozen to a standstill for the last 5 minutes 2/3 of the way through the download test. It has frozen on around 200kbps. This is my point. I pretty sure it is not down to there being too many people using the service as when I unplug the modem and connect again, the first few minutes are very good speed.

Are you using a download or internet accelerator? Those work most when there are lost of people on the same node, and they reduce graphics quality to increase load times of pages. William E C I AM WEC!!! http://iamwec.wordpress.com/ "If at first you don't succeed, redefine success!" - Anonymous

No I'm not using a download or internet accelarator, just my regular connection.

Try a different set of DNS IPs. http://www.opendns.com/smb/start

Since changing the DNS IP's to the ones recommended on that site I've seen clear improvement! Thanks very much. What do you suppose the issue was? My computer being unable to detect a decent DNS to use?