Top tips to improve your internet connection!

How to squeeze the most from your modem. Kai Chandler gets you cruising in the fast lane.

A few years ago it'd cost you an arm and a leg for a 300 bit per second modem. It might have taken forever to download the smallest file but it seemed amazing at the time. Now, we all take fast modems for granted.

Here are our top tips for squeezing your download speed 'til it squeaks.

#1 Ditch your modem. The first tip is to get rid of your modem and move to ADSL. Yes, broadband is available at low cost in most areas. Visit keyword broadband to see if it's supported by your exchange. If you are on broadband you can probably skip the rest of our top tips because you'll be enjoying life rather than fretting about your connection speed.

#2 Update your drivers. Ah - still here? You must love your modem! Perhaps cash is limited or you don't have ADSL in your area - read on.

Driver files are updated regularly by most modem manufacturers. For some modems, you can also "flash upgrade" the software in the modem to provide the latest (and fastest) communications software. Even so, you should be sure the driver is right for your operating system. To find the latest drivers, just enter the modem details into a search engine such as aolsearch.aol.co.uk/ or www.google.co.uk with the word "driver". So, to find drivers for a USR Sportster modem, enter "USR Sportster driver" and follow any instructions on how to install it. You can check your current modem drivers from Control Panel. With Windows XP, Select Start | Control Panel | Phone and Modem Options | Modems | Properties | Drivers.

#3 Surf when the yanks are in their PJs - the internet is much faster if the rest of the world is asleep. Try surfing while eating your bowl of breakfast corn flakes. It's much more bracing!

#4 Tweak your settings. Your PC has some settings that may improve modem throughput. All data sent over the internet goes in data packets. The size of these packets is the Maximum Transmission Unit or MTU. The aim is to send packets that are as large as possible without them needing to be broken down into smaller packets which would slow down your connection speed. A modem user, should set the (MTU) to 1500, the RWIN multiplier to 10 and Time to Live to 35. Download Tweak-Me or Tweak-XP to get this done for automatically you.

#5 Use FTP download wherever possible. If you want to download files, you can often choose between FTP or HTML download. FTP, (File Transfer Protocol,) is much faster for file transfers so you should choose that when you can.

#6 Use a high speed port. This'll only apply to readers with really old computers. The serial port may use an old, slow chip called a UART. The answer is to fit a high speed serial port with a 16550 UART chip or to fit an internal modem which includes one of these beasties.

#7 Use a download tool. There's nothing more frustrating than losing a connection near the end of a one hour download. The good news is that most downloads are resumable which means they can be restarted from where the connection failed. You need the right tool to manage the reconnection - one of the best is shareware Getright. Getright also searches for the fastest download sites and splits the download between several sites with the downloads running in parallel for the maximum possible download speed.

#8 Use a faster browser. Once you've connected to AOL, you can start any browser and run it in a second window. Opera is one of the fastest so why not download a free copy and give it a test run?

#9 Manage your cache. Every time you use the internet, images and other files are downloaded onto your hard disk. If a particular image or other file is needed in a subsequent session, it can be pulled from the disk faster than it could be downloaded again. They are kept in a "Temporary Internet Files" folder, often called Cache. When the folder is full, Windows deletes the oldest files.

You can vary the size of this folder by visiting Control Panel and selecting Internet Options. If you increase it, then more files can be stored on hard disk but if you go too far, then a slow PC may spend too long searching cache! You'll need to experiment to find the right level for your PC and internet connection speed.

#10 Define a blank homepage. Each time you start a browser outside your AOL window, the browser will go to the defined homepage. If this is slow, you should change the home page to a fast web site. If you are a real speed nut, set it to blank. To do this, go to Internet Options as above, and select Use Blank. Now your external browser is up and running in record time.

#11 Don't display images. Text only windows are much faster to download. You can easily restore images when required. Here's how to set whether to display images: From Internet Options (see above) select the Advanced tab. Scroll down until you see the multimedia section, then select or deselect "Show pictures." Select Apply then OK to save your change.

Make these changes and you'll be cruising in the fast lane!

 

Kai Chandler reviews top tools for family friendly surfing at www.surfcontrols.com