Surfing dead slow

[flumperino]

Hi all - could do with some help if poss!!

I run Win XP Pro on my PC, and have 512k broadband internet access. Just recently, browsing websites has become painfully slow, and is beginning to get dead annoying!

I have run many AVG virus scans of late, which come up clean; and also plenty of adaware scans to clean up the spyware.

I have wiped all of my temp internet files, URL history, cache, and cleaned up some unecessary cookies. I have defragmented my hard drive 3 times in the last month - it mainly consists of blue chunks of contigious files on the defrag analysis, though there are still quite a few bits and pices of fragmented files kicking around.

Hopefully I've listed all the main criteria. Any pointers at all would be greatly appreciated, as the sluggishness is really starting to get on my t1ts. :grr:

[cronus71]

Cablemodem or ADSL? if cablemodem, blame it on the granny next door, who's running a porn FTP. Have you done online speedschecks?

[flumperino]

cable modem dude

yeah, online speed-checks come out at about 450 kbit-ish, which i guess is about right.

That is what I can't understand: I can download stuff ok, its just the time it takes to move from one web-page to another

[Mr.James]

install spybot search and destroy to make sure you got no dodgy spyware on your machine.

run a virus check on it too

[flumperino]

cheers m8 - will i be better off using skybot as my main spyware killer, rather than adaware or pestpatrol

[white rabbit]

im having the same trouble. Anyone point me in the right direction to where i can get spybot from please

[flumperino]

http://www.safer-networking.org/index.php?page=download

here yar white rabbit

[cronus71]

I remember having something like this a few years ago, with my ADSL connection. I actually ended up formatting and re-installing windows then, but I had other issues as well, which prompted me to re-install.

A few things you could try

- another proxy
- try another browser to see if it's slow
- repair your IE (Run rundll32.exe setupapi,InstallHinfSection DefaultInstall 132 C:\windows\inf\ie.inf)

Since you can download OK, there's most likely some other program causing your IE to behave like that.

Another thing to try, run msconfig. Click the services tab, check "hide all microsoft services", then uncheck what's left in that window. Click the startup tab and uncheck everything. Apply, close, and restart. Reboot.

If no go, then selectively go through the non-microsoft services and startup items to determine which is causing the problem. Recheck all of the services first, reboot, then see if the problem occurs. If it does occur, then you know it's in the services. If it does not occur, then you know it's in the startup. Then selectively go through that to narrow it down to the actual offending service/startup item.

Source:myself and google.

[flumperino]

WOW - mega info. Thanks very much.....karma

Will try some of this stuff

[TwoPlAnKs]

it could be that your dns server is gay.

if you know what dns servers are then skip down a bit

all servers, and indeed normal computers, on the net have a IP adress. These are hard to remember since they basically consist of 4 numbers between 0 and 255. for simplicity, dns (domain name service/server) was started to allow speical helpful names to point to ips, such as www.google.com points to the ip of the google server etc. This means humans can remember stuff more easily. You only need to connect to the dns server once to find the IP for the site you want, so downloading a website that is only going to take 0.25 seconds or whatever would be severly slowed down if you are taking 20 seconds just to find the IP. a large download however would not be effected since you wouldnt notice 20 seconds extra.

start reading again here

try changing to something else, try automatically detecting them and try googling for other ones. they can be gotten to in your connection property thingies (cba hunting around - they are easy to find i just don't know where off hand)

you could also try start>run and typing cmd

when you get the to C:\tons of sh!t> prompt, type

nslookup www.google.com

and if it takes more than a few seconds then that is definitly your problem

hope this helps...
TwoSheds

[flumperino]

Thanks Twosheds

How much karma do you need to get back into the green??

[TwoPlAnKs]

lol - i really have over 500 posts and about +1 or +2 karma but i recently went through a bullshitting phase and all the admins fell out with me and set it to minus 32768 - so i need about that much to be green again

[flumperino]

well....I've slapped one on ya to help you on the road to redemption.

Cheers for the info

[TwoPlAnKs]

cheers m8 - hope it works now

[ukplc]

Cronus -

I've also got a slow surfing speed recently, and have checked for spyware etc.

Also getting a problem where every time I shut down, it says that it's trying to end rundll32.exe, but it isn't responding.

I'm not sure what you meant by:

" repair your IE (Run rundll32.exe setupapi,InstallHinfSection DefaultInstall 132 C:\windows\inf\ie.inf"

Rundll32.exe is always running on my PC. I looked for the file C:\windows\inf\ie.inf, and it was just a big text file that didn't make a lot of sense. As for the rest of what you wrote, I've no idea what it meant.

Any help would be much apprecated.
Thanks.

[cronus71]

Cronus -

I've also got a slow surfing speed recently, and have checked for spyware etc.

Also getting a problem where every time I shut down, it says that it's trying to end rundll32.exe, but it isn't responding.

I'm not sure what you meant by:

" repair your IE (Run rundll32.exe setupapi,InstallHinfSection DefaultInstall 132 C:\windows\inf\ie.inf"

Rundll32.exe is always running on my PC. I looked for the file C:\windows\inf\ie.inf, and it was just a big text file that didn't make a lot of sense. As for the rest of what you wrote, I've no idea what it meant.

Any help would be much apprecated.
Thanks.

Hi.

What Operating System do you have?
What I meant is, if you go to Start - Run and then copy paste this in thelittle window
rundll32.exe setupapi,InstallHinfSection DefaultInstall 132 C:\windows\inf\ie.inf
and click OK.

[ukplc]

I see.. yeah sorry about that..that was pretty dim of me not to realise it was the whole thing... anyways, I'm running Windows XP (Home Edition)...

Ok I tried that but it said it couldnt copy the file DHTMLED.OCX and it's asking for the XP Service Pack CD, which I dont have (my E-machines PC came with Recovery discs and nothing else). It says "Or, make sure the location specified is correct" (the current location is C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\i386, but it won't accept that...)


Dunno what's up with that...

[cronus71]

Wel in that case I'm not so sure, I mean if the system came with a recovery cd, with a preloaded image from E-Machines. I would imagine that you'd be better off just installing a standard XP image and then adding any additional drivers you require yourself, but that's of course another issue.

[ukplc]

Found the problem - it was the Flingstone Bridge Torjan Horse (see thread entitled "bridge.dll" below). All fixed now. Cheers for the advice though.

[cronus71]

Found the problem - it was the Flingstone Bridge Torjan Horse (see thread entitled "bridge.dll" below). All fixed now. Cheers for the advice though.

Nice one m8 well done.