WOT (Way off topic): Internet connection speed Featured

I wired my home with Cat 5e, probably the "new Cat 5", many years back and was careful to keep the runs as short as possible and to terminate the wall connectors as carefully as possible. Everything makes a homerun to a a patch panel in my "equipment room" (actually a closet in the basement) where the main router is also located. I too get speeds in the range of

So, to summarize:

- Other machines on the wired network get full speed

- Other machines on the WiFi network get full speed

- This machine cannot hit full speed on either wired or WiFi

This basically leaves you only a few remaining suspects:

- A very slow machine (you might post machine specs here)

- A badly misconfigured Operating System and/or drivers

Here's how you can see what the machine itself is capable of doing:

- Download the latest copy of Linux Mint and create a bootable DVD

- Boot the machine from the DVD

- Start a browser and go to

You can do this selectively over your WiFi and wired NIC as the internet connection.

This eliminates the OS and device drivers (unless your NIC or WiFi card are super weird).

If it hits full speed, you know the OS/Driver configuration you're running is borked.

If it still can't do full speed, it's your machine.

Thanks, Tim! I'll give it a shot.

Being an old Del i'd suspect a timing issue on the motherboard, likely due to a bad cap somewhere

Hi Tim,

I booted Linux Mint. (That's a great Linux version. It makes me want to set up another Linux box as a web server. I used to use Slackware.)

My connection was the correct 230mbps, on both old and new network cards. So the problem is not hardware!

I went through these steps below but still no luck.

Thanks!

Yeah, this is a common Windows and less common Mac problem. They develop middle aged spread and become slow and gross. Recommend you backup your critical data and do a clean install of your OS. If it is Windows 8, don't bother. If it is Windows 7 - you really should be using Win 10.

Linux Mint is a repackaging of the Ubuntu desktop that uses the Ubuntu repos. It was was created after Ubuntu utterly horked up the desktop UI experience. Mint Mate is a much better, much friendlier Windows-esque UI sitting on a nice, fast, and very well supported kernel. [I use Mint because it has a really nice installer. I don't user their UI at all because I prefer a minimalist, very light windows manager (Fluxbox) designed primarily for engineers and power users.]

Crazy update: It's the browser.

I was trying different things on Edge (my main browser, 125 mbps) and then tried Chrome again (also 125 mbps) and for the heck of it tried Firefox.

Firefox was the hoped-for 230mbps.

I took off all the extensions from Edge and it still downloads at 125 mbps. I don't know the answer yet, but I'm glad I know the issue now.

Thanks again!

I just checked here and Chrome on Linux shows full speed on a Linux machine. So ... either Chrome doesn't run well on your hardware or it's badly misconfigured.

One thing to look for with both Edge and Chrome is to see if they have a setting that limits how many concurrent TCP/IP sessions they allow. That may help tuning this.

Glad I could help.

Install the free version of CCleaner (or equivalent) and rid yourself of all those temp files.

Thanks, Walt. I have used CC cleaner before. I will use it now.

An update: Opera does not run at the higher speeds. The only browser that makes it to the high speeds is Firefox. Weird.

Try disabling or uninstalling everything "Smartbyte" from the Dell. This has been known to throttle connections.

I had GREAT hopes for this solution. But I don't have Smartbyte installed on my machine, as far as I can tell. I looked it up. Apparently, it's been an issue on a lot of machines.

Thanks!

Mike

Update: When I took breaks from work, I would google "chrome edge slow" or something like that and see what other people have tried because this is a known problem. I find things I haven't tried before, like regedits and command line resets. I decided to try the wifi again and what-do-you-know, the speeds are where I want them. I tried the faster network card and Lo! it was also fast. I tried to old network card and Yes! it was also fast.

So the honest answer is I don't know what setting I triggered to get the thing to work. But now it works. That's my report.

Thanks, again, for all the help!!

Computers suck.

I've been having trouble with my smartphone.

I was no longer getting alerts from a particular person that I was following on Tweeter. I checked every setting, both phone settings and Twitter settings. I unfollowed and refollowed. Nothing helped. I had given up. One day I added another person to follow and immediately alerts from the other person started up again. Nothing else was changed. All I did was add another, totally unrelated, person to follow.

Yesterday, SWMBO came home and asked me if I got her text. The answer was no. I checked her phone and indeed she had sent it hours ago. I made a different texting app the default app then switched back to the app I usually use. Immediately after making the original app the default again, I got at least 10 other texts from throughout the day and 2 *voicemails* - which should have nothing to do with which texting app I use. I had seen the calls come in that morning but couldn't answer them. I assumed that the callers hadn't left voicemails since I didn't get any notifications. When I played around with the texting apps at around 5PM, the voicemails suddenly showed up along with the texts.

Everything seems to be back to normal now, even though not a single device or app setting has been changed.

As with you, I may never know the actual problem that caused the issues.

Did you ever unplug your devices (router, modem) and leave them unplugged for a minute or so? It can take them that long to "forget" their settings. Perhaps this was the source of your problem. I'm glad to hear everything is working for you now!

Perhaps my "favorite" problem was when Comcast didn't tell me that they stopped supporting my cable modem, and just left me to figure out why my internet connection stopped working...that was amusing...lol.

It wasn't that I wasn't getting *any* texts, it was intermittent. Some came through, some didn't. Of course, I had no idea that that was happening until the flood of texts came in later in the day. I also had texts that I tried to send which would end up as "failed" only to find that they were actually sent. I didn't know that until people started asking me why I sent the same text twice.

Except that that's not the case. Verizon ended up sending me a replacement phone because of other issues that surfaced. The replacement phone has a battery that doesn't last more than a couple of hours. I can watch the battery percentage drop by 1% almost every minute with the phone just idling. I have to keep it plugged in all day so I can use it for work. SWMBO and I went for a hike this weekend. I put my Audew car jump starter in my backpack with a charging cable running to my phone.