Internet speed question

mustang84 · January 18, 2009

I bought a refurbished computer a couple months ago (Gateway QuadCore 32-bit, 4 gigs RAM, GeForce 9800 GT card, Vista Home) and keep it defragged and do a file clean on a regular basis. It's fast and has no problems with graphic-demanding games like GTA IV. But when it comes to the internet, it can be a real bitch sometimes as far as speed goes. My internet provider is Mediacom and I have an 8 mb/sec download speed, but the overall performance ranges from horrible on IE7 to mediocre on Google Chrome. Firefox falls in the middle.

Does anyone know what the cause is, and if there are any solutions? Is it due to Vista? Perhaps Norton system scan is being a pig in the background? I really have no idea, so any help would be appreciated!

gmpartsgirl · January 18, 2009

Are you running through a router? Wireless or wired?

Intrepidation · January 18, 2009

Norton is a pig, when the subscription expires get Avast! Antivirus.

Satty · January 18, 2009

Maybe one of the tubes is broken.

gmpartsgirl · January 18, 2009

Norton has always been a horrible resource hog and I still think some of their warnings and $h! are to make you think its doing something. I use the Avant browser and AVG antivirus, its great.

FAPTurbo · January 18, 2009

It might be a driver problem with your Ethernet.

See if you can update your drivers using this... http://support.gateway.com/support/drivers/dlcenter.asp

fightingbee · January 18, 2009

LOL, imagine the look you'd get going into Radio Shack or BB and asking if they had a tube tester. :blink:

Satty · January 18, 2009

LOL, imagine the look you'd get going into Radio Shack or BB and asking if they had a tube tester.

I'd have to explain to those young whipper snappers that the internet is a series of tubes.

'Stang, could your problem be that an internet was sent to you but got tangled up?

Ok, I'm done channeling Ted Stevens.

Edited January 18, 2009 by Satty

mustang84 · January 18, 2009

Are you running through a router? Wireless or wired?

Noped, wired.

Intrepidation · January 18, 2009

Sounds like a driver issue, or the ISP sucks. You could also try resetting the router and modem.

fightingbee · January 18, 2009

If you haven't already done so, you can test the ISP part

http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

BTW: If the internet is a series of tubes, will Al Gore come over with a pipe snake and clean them?

Edited January 18, 2009 by fightingbee

mustang84 · January 19, 2009

Download speed according to that site is 6.8 mbs.

It seems to do ok with simple graphics, but when a page has a plethora of Flash graphics it can struggle quite a bit. I'm thinking it might be the ISP since everything feels about the same as my old, slower computer (choppy performance, slow page loading).

loki · January 19, 2009

i don't have even a meg dsl, but when it gets really slow, and missing pages alot, i know it's time to reset the router. i have to do this every few months....

isn't vista getting an SP2 in the next few months? i know vista had some network slowage if it hasn't been patched...

just some ideas.

daves87rs · January 19, 2009

My gateway desktop is close to yours...and vista makes my dial up REAALLLYY slow.

My thinking is that is does have something to do with Vista....

mustang84 · January 20, 2009

I think I've figured it out. Apparently Firefox 3 and Google Chrome are both not optimized to work with Flash (or at least not as well as IE), so 3/4 of the time a page with flash graphics will either crash or cause the browser to slow to a crawl. I'm using IE7 right now and it's doing pretty decent (I hadn't used IE in a long time, so disregard my first post...IE6 used to be pretty painstaking for me and I rarely used it).

Oddly, Google Chrome worked ok when I first downloaded it, but now it seems like it can't handle any sort of Flash graphics. YouTube videos are choppy to the point of being unwatchable. Firefox 2 used to work fine with Flash, but the latest version sucks. With the amount of webpages that have some sort of Flash interface or Flash advertising, I don't understand why they are not optimized to run it like IE is.

Edited January 20, 2009 by mustang84

Intrepidation · January 20, 2009

That doesn't seem accurate. I work with flash all the time and FireFox 3 has no issues with it, and neither does IE.

regfootball · January 20, 2009

vista sucks norton sucks. no wonder microsoft is rushing 7 to the market. vista has not been received well, and rightfully so. nothing sucks ass more than vista.

Intrepidation · January 20, 2009

vista sucks norton sucks. no wonder microsoft is rushing 7 to the market. vista has not been received well, and rightfully so. nothing sucks ass more than vista.

Maybe the users just suck? Vista's not perfect, and I do prefer XP, but it's not terrible. There admin/permission thing can get annoying if you're working within the system, but normally it's not a big deal. The only thing that really bugs me about Vista is that bluetooth doesn't work properly on it.

Norton, however, sucks bahls.

capriceman · January 20, 2009

Reg please just ignore any conversation with computers in it, okay?

As for Stang,

I doubt its flash but its worth an update. http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

With a Quad and vista it should handle Norton easily in the background processes. It is a hog, but pretty effective. I use AVG free with Spybot search and destroy.

I really couldn't help you being I'm not there to see whats happening. However try these,

hold the windows key (usually between the ctrl and alt key) and then hit the letter "R" at the same time. should bring up "run" type in "CMD" this will bring up command.

In the lovely ms dos command prompt. Type "ping www.gm.com" It should somthing like

C:\Users\Desktop>ping www.gm.com

Pinging a1073.g.akamai.net [204.2.249.65] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 204.2.249.65: bytes=32 time=68ms TTL=52
Reply from 204.2.249.65: bytes=32 time=82ms TTL=52
Reply from 204.2.249.65: bytes=32 time=69ms TTL=52
Reply from 204.2.249.65: bytes=32 time=67ms TTL=52

Ping statistics for 204.2.249.65:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 67ms, Maximum = 82ms, Average = 71ms

Do this a couple of time in a row. See where the % loss is? make sure its 0% every time. If it misses one then it will look a little like this

C:\Users\God>ping www.gm.com

Pinging a1073.g.akamai.net [8.21.193.58] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 8.21.193.58: bytes=32 time=43ms TTL=56
Reply from 8.21.193.58: bytes=32 time=35ms TTL=56
Reply from 8.21.193.58: bytes=32 time=34ms TTL=56
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 8.21.193.58:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 3, Lost = 1 (25% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 34ms, Maximum = 43ms, Average = 37ms

The reason for this is, I have seen where a NIC (network Interface Card) or modem or router have had a dieing port or broken port where the RJ45 network cable goes into. Even the cable could be bad. and it will cause the computer to miss packets of info which it needs to load a page. it can miss a couple and be sent back to you again and you can barley notice it however flash apps are bigger and if its not getting every packet the first time then its rather a pain and slow. Also next to the clock there are 2 computers with a picture of the earth. Does that ever show a Yellow Triangle?

If you ISP is claiming 8.0 megabits a second that is aprox. 1 megabyte a second. from bits to byte divide by 8. your average download speed should be around 600-700 kilobytes which is damn fast. meaning James Gang Funk #49 witch is a 3:53 long song and is 4.5 Megabytes big should take about 6.5 seconds to download in a perfect world. If you have Dial-up which is 56 kilobits which is a max of 6 kilobytes a second that same song will take about 19:15 to download in a perfect world. Hopefully that makes sense. If its your ISP that causing your bog then call and complain and have them send out a tech for free.

Reg, In the 2009 market place Vista runs excellent on any machine sold. However, if your machine is from lets say 2004? 2.6 ghz pentium 4 1 gig of ddr 250 hdd. Decent computer and still is. but Its for xp not vista. Vista is Next gen stuff ddr2-3 dual and quad cores 2.0ghz and up with more than 1mb of cache. Once you have this next gen stuff and its good not dual core celerons and semprons. you will find vista ran just as fast as XP did. Im sick of your anti vista bias in EVERY PC THREAD. Buy a mac and shut the f@#k up then. Macs run good because they have next gen stuff not because of OSX, seen a MB pro run vista? its amazing. They said a long time ago that vista was gonna go for a 3 year run because they were gonna change a lot of source code for vista but, that didn't happen. Its still off the Win2000 nt kernal like XP is. Don't quote me but Win 7 is supposed to have that source code change that vista was going to have. Windows 7 Should be more efficient and less memory intensive since its not XP running a demanding GUI (graphical user interface).

I might be wrong because I'm not a pro but i know a little to be dangerous.

Intrepidation · January 20, 2009

Great post Capricman!

mustang84 · January 20, 2009

Awesome post Capriceman, very helpful! I tried the prompt log, but as soon as the window opened it ran through the first five lines ending with TTL=54 and then the window closed automatically, so I wasn't able to see the % loss. How do you keep the window from closing?

My internet is very fast when a page is simple HTML, but anything with Flash seems to cause it to slow or freeze up. I've tried reinstalling Flash before but it didn't seem to make a difference.

Intrepidation · January 20, 2009

Well html itself is fast to load on almost any speed (not counting photos).

As capriceman said, it's hard to diagnose without being there.

capriceman · January 20, 2009

when the run window comes up type "CMD" and the black window will stay up. in the black window type "ping www.gm.com"

hmmm.... this is a tricky one. could be flash conflicting with a video driver. http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_181.20_whql.html

Intrepidation · January 20, 2009

Also, to add to the Vista thing. I have installed it on Jessica's computer that I built her and it's as fast as XP on my machine.

mustang84 · January 20, 2009

It shows 0% loss.

I'm installing the driver components and it's taking a while...I'll let you know the outcome tomorrow.

Edited January 20, 2009 by mustang84

Intrepidation · January 20, 2009

Question: the Flash problem, is it loading the file or playing it?

mustang84 · January 21, 2009

Question: the Flash problem, is it loading the file or playing it?

On Chome, most of the time I get an error message that says Flash has crashed before the video even loads. On Firefox, it will load, but it takes a long time and visuals start off choppy (about 1 frame per second) and usually the video ends up frozen on a frame after about 10 seconds. Sound works fine though.

I installed the driver components, but they don't seem to have made a difference.

Intrepidation · January 21, 2009

Try updating the video card (or integrated graphics, depending what you have) drivers.

Drew Dowdell · January 21, 2009

uninstall and reinstall Adobe flash

Satty · January 21, 2009

Jiggle the power cord

regfootball · January 21, 2009

Reg please just ignore any conversation with computers in it, okay?
As for Stang,

I doubt its flash but its worth an update. http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

With a Quad and vista it should handle Norton easily in the background processes. It is a hog, but pretty effective. I use AVG free with Spybot search and destroy.

I really couldn't help you being I'm not there to see whats happening. However try these,

hold the windows key (usually between the ctrl and alt key) and then hit the letter "R" at the same time. should bring up "run" type in "CMD" this will bring up command.

In the lovely ms dos command prompt. Type "ping www.gm.com" It should somthing like
C:\Users\Desktop>ping www.gm.com

Pinging a1073.g.akamai.net [204.2.249.65] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 204.2.249.65: bytes=32 time=68ms TTL=52
Reply from 204.2.249.65: bytes=32 time=82ms TTL=52
Reply from 204.2.249.65: bytes=32 time=69ms TTL=52
Reply from 204.2.249.65: bytes=32 time=67ms TTL=52

Ping statistics for 204.2.249.65:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 67ms, Maximum = 82ms, Average = 71ms
Do this a couple of time in a row. See where the % loss is? make sure its 0% every time. If it misses one then it will look a little like this
C:\Users\God>ping www.gm.com

Pinging a1073.g.akamai.net [8.21.193.58] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 8.21.193.58: bytes=32 time=43ms TTL=56
Reply from 8.21.193.58: bytes=32 time=35ms TTL=56
Reply from 8.21.193.58: bytes=32 time=34ms TTL=56
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 8.21.193.58:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 3, Lost = 1 (25% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 34ms, Maximum = 43ms, Average = 37ms
The reason for this is, I have seen where a NIC (network Interface Card) or modem or router have had a dieing port or broken port where the RJ45 network cable goes into. Even the cable could be bad. and it will cause the computer to miss packets of info which it needs to load a page. it can miss a couple and be sent back to you again and you can barley notice it however flash apps are bigger and if its not getting every packet the first time then its rather a pain and slow. Also next to the clock there are 2 computers with a picture of the earth. Does that ever show a Yellow Triangle?

If you ISP is claiming 8.0 megabits a second that is aprox. 1 megabyte a second. from bits to byte divide by 8. your average download speed should be around 600-700 kilobytes which is damn fast. meaning James Gang Funk #49 witch is a 3:53 long song and is 4.5 Megabytes big should take about 6.5 seconds to download in a perfect world. If you have Dial-up which is 56 kilobits which is a max of 6 kilobytes a second that same song will take about 19:15 to download in a perfect world. Hopefully that makes sense. If its your ISP that causing your bog then call and complain and have them send out a tech for free.

Reg, In the 2009 market place Vista runs excellent on any machine sold. However, if your machine is from lets say 2004? 2.6 ghz pentium 4 1 gig of ddr 250 hdd. Decent computer and still is. but Its for xp not vista. Vista is Next gen stuff ddr2-3 dual and quad cores 2.0ghz and up with more than 1mb of cache. Once you have this next gen stuff and its good not dual core celerons and semprons. you will find vista ran just as fast as XP did. Im sick of your anti vista bias in EVERY PC THREAD. Buy a mac and shut the f@#k up then. Macs run good because they have next gen stuff not because of OSX, seen a MB pro run vista? its amazing. They said a long time ago that vista was gonna go for a 3 year run because they were gonna change a lot of source code for vista but, that didn't happen. Its still off the Win2000 nt kernal like XP is. Don't quote me but Win 7 is supposed to have that source code change that vista was going to have. Windows 7 Should be more efficient and less memory intensive since its not XP running a demanding GUI (graphical user interface).

I might be wrong because I'm not a pro but i know a little to be dangerous.

all i have to do is point out that they offer vista downgrades in plenty of computer stores like dell etc. because unilateral public opinion is that vista is an unmitigiated failure.

microshaft sullied their already poor rep even more with the haphazard rollout of vista. enough so that no one really respects them as a company any more.

joke status, regardless of what apple or anyone else does. i sure hope for microsoft's sake that windows 7 works. they already blew chunks with vista and now gmail taking over the outlook thing.

it's not all about hardware either. vista's interface is mostly why its so terrible. they took a product everyone was used to (XP) and turned it into something you can't use without frequent cursing.

sort of an idrive fiasco.

my dad bought a new computer last week with vista. i am guessing this weekend he'll be calling and asking all sorts of questions on how in the hell do you get this machine to do what you want it to. my brother in law (ex IT systems architect kind of guy) was even pleading for him to find a machine with XP downgrade.

my XP machine here is a year and a half old from new. my windows ME machines (which sucked too) ran better than this joke of a machine. The XP pro machine i had recently at work was the best work machine i had ever had. at least microsoft finally got XP right.

its always funny to listen to the amount of time 'windows guys' spend just keeping their machines working half correctly. LOL. how many hours of your life you'll never get back 'searching for drivers' LMAO

Edited January 21, 2009 by regfootball

Intrepidation · January 21, 2009

all i have to do is point out that they offer vista downgrades in plenty of computer stores like dell etc. because unilateral public opinion is that vista is an unmitigiated failure.
microshaft sullied their already poor rep even more with the haphazard rollout of vista. enough so that no one really respects them as a company any more.

joke status, regardless of what apple or anyone else does. i sure hope for microsoft's sake that windows 7 works. they already blew chunks with vista and now gmail taking over the outlook thing.

it's not all about hardware either. vista's interface is mostly why its so terrible. they took a product everyone was used to (XP) and turned it into something you can't use without frequent cursing.

sort of an idrive fiasco.

my dad bought a new computer last week with vista. i am guessing this weekend he'll be calling and asking all sorts of questions on how in the hell do you get this machine to do what you want it to. my brother in law (ex IT systems architect kind of guy) was even pleading for him to find a machine with XP downgrade.

my XP machine here is a year and a half old from new. my windows ME machines (which sucked too) ran better than this joke of a machine. The XP pro machine i had recently at work was the best work machine i had ever had. at least microsoft finally got XP right.

its always funny to listen to the amount of time 'windows guys' spend just keeping their machines working half correctly. LOL. how many hours of your life you'll never get back 'searching for drivers' LMAO

As usual when it comes to computers, you have no idea what you are talking about. Vista's interface is very similar to XP, it's just streamlined and less cluttered. Of course you can set it to look like Windows Classic if your brain can't comprehend the shininess. Directories such as Pictures and such have been moved, but now the Pictures folder for example, is out in the open not embedded within Documents.

I'm a "Windows Guy", it took me all of however long the setup process to install the OS was to make it work properly.

Again it is hardware and user ignorance/stupidity that makes Vista seem like it sucks. If you take just a moment to quit your bitching, look at it, and use a machine that doesn't suck, it's just fine.

capriceman · January 21, 2009

its always funny to listen to the amount of time 'windows guys' spend just keeping their machines working half correctly. LOL. how many hours of your life you'll never get back 'searching for drivers' LMAO

funny how vista and windows updates found all my drivers it took longer to download firefox/flash/java than it did to find drivers and im running all custom $h!. also funny how it found my legacy parallel HP plotter too.

Anyway,

Im sorry stang, Thats just an odd problem. if you uninstall flash be sure to do it from Start>Computer Then in the little tool bar there's uninstall a program.

mustang84 · January 21, 2009

I did some research and found out my problem is pretty common. It seems to be something with Flash Player 10...if you uninstall and go back to Flash 9, the freezing problem goes away. On the Adobe help website, tons of people have stated this exact same problem dating back to October '08 and hardly any of them have had responses from Adobe support. It seems like Adobe dropped the ball and not Chrome/Firefox.

Anyway, I guess I'll try uninstalling Flash 10 and see if I can find a link for Flash 9.

Intrepidation · January 21, 2009

Adobe seems to being going downhill lately. PS CS4 is a memory hog that's is slower than CS3 with few actual benefits.

regfootball · January 21, 2009

As usual when it comes to computers, you have no idea what you are talking about. Vista's interface is very similar to XP, it's just streamlined and less cluttered. Of course you can set it to look like Windows Classic if your brain can't comprehend the shininess. Directories such as Pictures and such have been moved, but now the Pictures folder for example, is out in the open not embedded within Documents.
I'm a "Windows Guy", it took me all of however long the setup process to install the OS was to make it work properly.

Again it is hardware and user ignorance/stupidity that makes Vista seem like it sucks. If you take just a moment to quit your bitching, look at it, and use a machine that doesn't suck, it's just fine.

unfortunately for you and your misguided bias, there is a sizable part of the US public that hates vista, bad product that people do not like to use. that's the simple fact. i sure hope for microsoft's sake that they put out a decent windows 7.

capriceman · January 21, 2009

http://www.filehippo.com/download_flashplayer_firefox/4008/ firefox

http://www.filehippo.com/download_flashplayer_ie/4007/ IE

Intrepidation · January 21, 2009

unfortunately for you and your misguided bias, there is a sizable part of the US public that hates vista, bad product that people do not like to use. that's the simple fact. i sure hope for microsoft's sake that they put out a decent windows 7.

That's because a sizeable chunk of the US public are idiots.

And please, you calling me bias?

Satty · January 21, 2009

I prefer XP to Vista, mostly because I've barely used Vista. Jill's laptop runs it, but I never use it.

deftonesfan867 · January 21, 2009

Vista is OK and has some nice features, but it's a resource hog IMO. I'd rather have a new computers speed but w/ XP so it uses it better.

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