Computer help forum: Online browsing speeds deteriorating over time

come to learn that I had not dona any maintenance on it. I used CC Cleaner and deleted about 500meg of history and cookies yes that is a lot!....

Now no issues and FF is just as fast as always.... use your favorite tool and try it.....

Using a Mac OS-X, so what little I know of PC's..
Look up or in your 'find' tab... 'defrag' term and location where you can self clean old/bad files.

may help. again mac user now, pc user 5-10 years ago.

dak-d

It is strange to note the vehemence and stridency shown by some of the members while addressing the question of Mac vs. PC. It is a kind of tribalism which contributes nothing to the debate.
I use both Macbook and a PC for going on the Internet. As it happens I have faced issues with both for various reasons and found the Cnet experts come to help with praiseworthy generosity of spirit and knowledge. However there are limits.
My machines are around six years old and occasionally have the issue of slow internet speed.
I do the discerning clean ups and often found the main cause, was the things beyond my control i.e. what happens at the local centre from where the Internet supplier supplies the service.
Very occasionally there is a glitch with the supply side and at times it is just the traffic which clogs up the small rural systems.
The advice I think is to be patient and perhaps switch off, off for a time and things get better after a while. Obviously my experience is of rural areas ( in UK) where the substation for supply is at the limits of its reach. More importantly the nature of the use of the Internet. I do not run a business and an hour or so of switching off is of little or no consequence.
If I were so concerned and had my business, I would run my business from a place where the supply was up to the standard required. I know there are issues which concern your hardware, but not as many as you may may think.
My experience is mainly leisure, pleasure and social interaction and short period switching off does not make any difference and perhaps frees the line for those who can not hang about.
Shafiq

google chrome has massive security leaks , IE is the only choice ,
search google , how ironic

Based on the personal experience and experience of the companies I'm servicing (I'm in IT), IE is way more secure and less expose to the trojans than FF or Chrome.

Many things accumulate in a system over time and some of them slow things down.
To check the actual speed of your connection try:
http://www.speedtest.net/
The middle of the page has a "Begin Test" button, there are also ADs for various "Free" system checks but these will all find problems and allow you to purchase their product to fix them. I cannot vouch for any of those as I use a manual clean up myself.
Most versions of Windows and the associated applications, do not properly manage memory and most have leaks which disable sections of memory as they run and that "feature" gradually slows down all processes. Reboot at least once a day to avoid this becoming a real problem. Disk files become fragmented which also slows the access time, so de-fragmenting is often helpful. Temporary files also slow down access as there are more headers to check when searching for the needed file, so removing unneeded temporary files is helpful.
Browsers have changed and now open multiple pages with tabs and so one is encouraged to have many internet windows open, this also slows things down as the browser is now managing a large amount of data. Looking at the Task Manager will show the amount of memory being used by each instance of the browser, things work much faster when this is as low as possible (only a single browser with one tab open).
There are lots of other things which slow systems down, I find I need to completely renew my system every 6 months or so to avoid the slow running. When I first installed each version of Windows and the associated applications I created an image copy which can be used to restore back to that point on that computer. When things start running slowly I copy any data that I may need to temporary storage, reformat the system drive and restore my original image, before copying back the data. This invariably makes things much faster almost like a new system.
Hope some of my thoughts prove helpful.

I would really like to spend an hour or so writing about all of the possibilities that may slow down your internet browser, but I'm going to provide you a link to a really terrific tutorial about Browsers and Internet speed. If you read it thoroughly, I think you'll find all of the information you need.

Cleaning out your Temporary Internet files using Disk Cleanup should help a lot. Also make sure you look at your Task Manager to see if there are any Processes that are eating up all of your CPU/RAM resources.

At the end of the day, if things still seem too slow, sometimes the best thing is just to back up your data and reload Windows for a fresh start.

Here's the link:

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/slow-browser.html

Hope this helps.

Is there a newer address?

Damn fine article that one Charlie, and the other topics covered on the site are a really good read too !
The author actually talks common sense....a rare commodity in the rarefied atmosphere of PC speak.
Thank you,
Brian

If you use the right anti-virus/malware you won't be impacted by performance problems; even if you use more than one anti-malware.

Many of my first time clients are discovered to be using more than one firewall or anti-virus; this is not only a big performance impactor, but a peril to the operating system!

Insufficient information - eg. what maintenance do you do regularly.
When did you last do a full anti-virus check?
When did you last do a disk clean?
When did you last do a run with Ccleaner?
Have you changed providers lately (can have leftover problems with routing, proxies, etc)
When did you last do a defrag?
Is your browser set to delete cookies when closing?
What Firewall are you using, check settings (You may be running 2 firewalls if IE's is running).
Are you on a network?
Is other software running auto updates?

Do all of the above that you can and come back with comment on any improvement.

A reformat is the last thing to ever do. The majority of PC users would never reformat in the lifetime of their PC. I run a 5 year old PC with XP and browsing times are excellent (boot up may be slow as I run lots of software). I also run a 1 year old laptop with XP and that also has excellent browser speeds. I have IE8, Chrome and FireFox on both and there is very little difference between them (I prefer FF to the others)
Do your full maintenance, update all your software, get rid of anything you don't use and see how that goes.
Mal

Haven't reinstalled XP in 7-9 years on three different computers. NO PROBLEMS. Turned off automatic updates years ago and only download the vital ones MANUALLY (but I know what I'm doing.)
Windows 7, on two different units, bluescreens occurred repeatedly. Had to reinstall within weeks on both, and with all the updates, the damn thing is just unreliable.
I update/reinstall my Linux partitions regularly, not because they don't run, but because of the regular innovations that occur (and it doesn't cost a dime to upgrade to a new version, so it's worth it.)
This proves, "your mileage may vary."

As you mentioned, you are running Windows XP with 3GB of RAM. If you recently expanded you memory, I recommend to check with the software tool CPU-Z, under Memory, the frequency of current timing of you 3GB RAM. The capability of each bank of RAM is show in the SPD Timings Table of CPU-Z. The capability of you hard ware you can check in the user guide of motherboard or simply run CPU-Z with one memory bank. If the memory banks are different, use the memory bank with the highest frequency specification. The frequency specification is shown in the SPD Timing table for each selected slot (use Memory Slot Selection). If the frequency increase with one memory bank monitored with CPU-Z under Memory, Timings, Frequency, it is time to check the recommended memory configurations in the user guide of motherboard.

Personally I could not find the appropriate memory banks to expand the RAM of my seven and a half years old PC.
In my case LESS MEMORY (1GB) IS MORE SPEED for online browsing.

Best regards, manahatta

he would have to be running XP x64 bit