SPEED It's one of those things you can never have quite enough of... whether you're one of the lucky few with a high speed connection of your own (though statistically most of us surf from work with the company's high speed line... even when we're looking for another job) or like the majority of us at home suffering through the relative snail's pace of a dial-up connection... faster is ALWAYS better... there are many hard to find and hiden settings that affect how your computer makes use of whatever connection you have... so,the first thing to do is speed up the surfing. The settings from the "factory" in windows are best used on a LAN...local access network...like in your office. The first link will take you to a site where you can get an "Internet optimizer"...this will dynamically change the settings to the best for your dial up connection, cable modem. whatever. It also includes a prefetching program... it goes ahead of you and uses the time while you read, think, etc. to get started on the links on the page, an the links ahead and behind so the pages are ready when you are... and changes it's behavior over time based on your personal surfing habits... it's called "Webcelerator"... it's free. They have another program that will speed up your computer too. Another great utility that does prefetching and optimization plus ad blocking... and a host of other very good things... also for free... is Naviscope... th feature list is extensive go to their site and read the full list. If you would rather have your connection optimized without prefetching, there is a program called iSpeed that will make the adjustments through several preset options, or you can tinker with it if you'd like, but doesn't have the links ready for you. Some people believe prefetching hogs somebody elses bandwidth out in cyberspace... iSpeed doesn't do this... yet it still offers up to a 60% increase in speed. It comes in two varieties as of this writing. The slightly older version is free HERE at ZDNet... the newest version is shareware/try before you buy at Even though you have a 56k modem, you may not be connecting to your provider at anything close to that... cable systems, and DSL systems have the same problem... the speed you're told you will connect at is not neccessarily reality... there are programs available to correct this.. a good example is Bob Connect... it will force your provider to connect at 56k... abd will automatically redial through as many connections as you have set up until it gets through... Another sure fire way to get... and keep... your speed up is to properly maintain your computer... defragmenting your hard drive, meaning reorganizing your memory and programs will make a very big difference over time... nad getting rid of the extra files your computer makes for short term use and then leaves behind can make a major difference as well... Windows comes with utilities to accomplish these things to some extent... and they can be automated usong the task manager and the scheduled maintenance wizard... see your help file... there are many downloadable free and shareware programs that can do even better. Search for them at these sites and others... these are some of the best, but there are many, many more... a very comprehensive guide is available from Internet 101 ...search for software downloads at GOOGLE and see. Another way to increase your speed is to get things done the first time... or automate them so you don't have to fool with them ovr again... downloading software to try and use makes your computer much more capable, and much more fun... but downloading it's self can be frustrating at times... your computer came with a set of programs that will alow you to download from either FTP or HTTP sites, but they can be vastly improved upon... there is a shareware program called GetRight that will schedule downloads for times when you're not trying to surf... so not taking up your bandwidth at an inopertune time... it will even turn your computer on, connect to the internet, make the connection, download a list of files from different sites, virus check them as they arrive, then close the connection and shut off your computer when it's done... best of all, it will automatically restart downloads from where ever they broke off... and they will break off... I have downloaded 3689 file so far with mine... a total of 17,033.22 MB and out of that has saved me from re-downloading 304.63MB MB... that's a lot of time and frustration saved for other things... it's not free, but it's worth it. The smaller the size of the files you send and recieve, the faster they will be done... and almost all software available for download uses file compression... there are many forms and ratios, but the most common by far is the .zip format... and the most popular and versatile program for these files... compressing, uncompresing, and creating self extracting (uncompressing... to send to people who don't have a zip utility) is WinZip... it's shareware, and can be downloaded at almost any software site, or their own. If you don't intend to zip, only unzip, files... and you'd like a small free zip utility, there is one on the first page of the Toy Club section of this site called CanUnzip, along with 50 other fun or useful programs... click the downloads button on the menu... or click here |