Computer questions and solutions....thereof...

[blues2cruise]

I finally got my computer working properly. I did a little looking around and found the place for me to reset some things.

I find a couple of sites still load a bit slow, (like TMW for example) but my surfing is so much better now.

Thanks again for helping me to trouble shoot.

[roscowgo]

Glad you got it fixed. Glad you werent infected too

sorry we were so far off in the troubleshooting dept.

Line problems are a pain in the butt, i had comcast for a couple of years, for the last 6 months of my service i couldnt have my tv and modem online at the same time. Signal was too weak. I eventually got someone to admit that the line from the pole to my house was full of water. They wanted to charge me to replace it.


Only option i had though..... theyll never get my business again.

[blues2cruise]

I still have internet problems. I was talking to a co-worker who is fairly well versed in computer stuff....or so he would lead me to believe...he sure does enough stuff with it.

Anyway, he suggested that there may a bot implanted by a hacker who is using my bandwith which is why my connection is so slow.
He suggested I may have to reformat my computer.

Is this something I can do, or do I have to call in a techie?

I have run Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D, Norton, a registry cleaner and there is a firewall.
I cleared out the cache and ran a defrag.

I don't know what else I can do.

When my friend was here and ran a speed test, it showed my download speed was only 10%, so we contacted the ISP and they said there had been a problem with the line. They claimed to have fixed it.

I don't recall the site that had the speed test to see the download times.

I'm going to see if telus will let me out of my contract because they obviously aren't holding up their end of it.

This is slower than dial up.

[blues2cruise]

How long should it take for an email message of 11.8mb to download into my mailbox?

[ofblong]

uhh if you already talked to tech support and they admited to a problem on their end with the speeds of your internet you dont have a bot on your computer and with adware/spyware/anti virus you would find it anyways. However formatting is easy to do there is lots of tutorials on the web on how to do that. www.google.com is your friend.

Firefox is awesome because of tabbed browsing but I have ie7 for the rare and I do mean rare occasion firefox cant open/handle a website properly.

[CNF2002]

Also look for the Internet Explorer plug-in for Firefox. It puts a button on the bottom of your browser that allows you to switch to an emulated IE mode to run web applications that will not work in fox.

Every once and a while I find a page that the designer seemed to only test in IE! moviephone.com will only run its movies in IE (probably in bed with MS) and nothing on Microsoft's site will work in fox because forcing you to use their proprietary software is a staple of the Microsoft business model.

[blues2cruise]

Thanks you two.

Has anyone used Opera? I was reading somewhere and folks were talking about it.

[jonnythan]

Thanks you two.

Has anyone used Opera? I was reading somewhere and folks were talking about it.

Opera is pretty good.

I'm not sure what's causing your slowdown. I don't suspect spyware or bots if Ad-Aware and such aren't finding anything. A bot sits quietly until instructed to do something, they don't suck down massive bandwidth. They don't really download things, especially not over a long period of time. Spyware doesn't either.

I'd be hesitant about saying Telus is at fault at this point, though.

My first guess is that there is another computer using your connection and you may not realize it. If you have a router, which I hope you do, you could very well have a wireless router that comes "open" by default and a neighbor is "piggybacking" on your connection and using it to download things (movies, music, pirated software, etc).

[blues2cruise]

Thanks you two.

Has anyone used Opera? I was reading somewhere and folks were talking about it.

Opera is pretty good.

I'm not sure what's causing your slowdown. I don't suspect spyware or bots if Ad-Aware and such aren't finding anything. A bot sits quietly until instructed to do something, they don't suck down massive bandwidth. They don't really download things, especially not over a long period of time. Spyware doesn't either.

I'd be hesitant about saying Telus is at fault at this point, though.

My first guess is that there is another computer using your connection and you may not realize it. If you have a router, which I hope you do, you could very well have a wireless router that comes "open" by default and a neighbor is "piggybacking" on your connection and using it to download things (movies, music, pirated software, etc).

Hmmmm, I will have to look into that. Thanks for the suggestion.

[Nibblet99]

Before you even consider formatting, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE ALL THE SOFTWARE DISKS & LICENSE NUMBERS / CD KEYS to put back on it, afterwards.

Also I use SpyBot and love it, but Spybot maker himself also recommends you get another free program called Spyware Blaster. having both installed for about 2 years now, I have not had 1 single problem crop up.

Only difference with spyware blaster is you have to manually click the update button (about 3 mouse clicks), OR you have to make a donation if you want the software to automatically keep itself up to date