I'm not sure if this is the right place but I've got a quick question. You'll have to forgive me as my knowledge of computers is very limited, even my 13 year old son knows more than me but I'm starting to feel like that's a legal requirement.
For the last few weeks I've been experiencing extremely slow page load times and often getting site not found, presumably as it's taking too long, now when I say slow page loads I'm using Firefox as my browser with the page load timer and we're talking minutes to load pages of plain text on GTP, I even tried GTP lite, switching off avatars and signatures to try and cut the times down to no avail. My cookies and cache folders are cleared every time I close my browser.
When I contacted an engineer from my internet service provider, (they also supply the majority of my road with cable TV), who for now shall remain nameless, the test from thier end showed no speed problems and he then proceeded to try and blame firefox till I informed him that firefox was installed
after the problems started, he then went on to tell me it was my norton firewall causing the problem? It's never slowed it before?
After checking with a few friends who live in the same street as me and use the same company, I have since found out they have recently been experiencing similar problems.
My theory is that my internet service provider has too many customers in the local area and has overloaded the local cable supplying my street, sorry, like I said my knowledge of correct terms is very limited.
My reasoning for this is that when I use the computer before I go to work, at around 6 am, the browser runs perfectly, pages load in seconds?
Now the engineer I spoke to was adamant that my problems were software related and as my knowledge of such issues are not what they should be I had no reason at the time to argue otherwise. But, if thats the case, why are the software issues not affecting my computer at times I would consider "off-peak"? Obviously the engineer is not going to tell me that they have too many customers using thier line now are they?
I well may be way off the mark but if I'm correct, what can I do about it and/or would switching to another service provider solve my problems?
I hope someone can help me with this as the page load times really are becoming a pain in the rear.
If I've posted this question in the wrong place I apologise, if so please point me in the right direction as working with my current problem would take me weeks to manually search out some sort of solution, trust me it's no fun trying to do all your web surfing when you should be sleeping for work the next day?
Darren.
6mbps!
