Tag Archives: slow internet

intermittent internet dropouts

Computer Aid Posted on by

After replacing a faulty ADSL modem, the main PC worked fine, but the wireless laptop would either lose its connection to the internet, or websites would be very very slow to load.

A quick way to test this was to ping google.com.au.

Sometimes ping would say something like “connection unavailable” or it would timeout, or give return times of over 2000 ms.

I know ping return times are normally between 150 ms and 400 ms, so something is wrong.

The wireless signal strength is excellent.

The laptop is a fairly new core2duo, and it hasn’t had these problems in the past.

As I’m taking to the owner, I mention that Norton might be interfering somehow… its expired, so I’ll probably need to remove it.

He says that Norton shouldn’t be running. He had a mate tell him Nod32 offered the best protection. So this friend installed nod32, but couldn’t remove norton…

Ahhh, I’ve been here before… back in the days before dual-core CPUs.

So, it looks like running 2 antivirus programs doesn’t appear to slow down a multi-core CPU much, but it does drive the internet connection haywire.

Something to remember for “next time”.

Google toolbar add-on slows ie7

Computer Aid Posted on by

Its not often that I have bad things to say about Google.

In this case, a customers ie7 had slowed down to slower than dialup speeds (and would often give a webpage not found error).

However, email, ping, messenger, etc all works perfectly.

Her husbands PC also worked perfectly using ie7.

So the problem was only on her PC, and with ie7 specifically.

My first step was to clear the browser cache.

That didn’t work, so the next step was to start ie7 in no add-ons mode (start -> programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Internet explorer (no add-ons) )

And now ie7 worked at full speed.

Since I’ve seen this happen a few time before, I decided to find out exactly which add-on was causing this problem.

Luckily there weren’t many add-ons, so it didn’t take long to find the culprit: the Google toolbar add-on

The problem would always dissappear if the add-on was disabled.

Since the customer actually needed the google toolbar (she had a lot of favorites/bookmarks saved via the google toolbar), I needed to fix it.

The only thing to do was to uninstall (and reinstall) the toolbar. I was sure that the bookmarks wouldn’t be lost (they are saved by google… or maybe locally), but uninstalling the toolbar shouldn’t remove them.

Sure enough, after reinstalling the toolbar, ie7 works normally again, and all the bookmarks are still there.