Browsing Speed

It's not that the speed of page loading is so slow, but I changed my connection speed yesterday with my ISP to double that which I had before, yet I don't see any difference in how rapidly a page loads with any of my browsers. When downloading a file, it does load twice as fast as before.

This caused my to reflect on how I reset the port speed settings in XP, using the Recovery Console and the ems redirect to 115200 (dialup days), even though it was set to this within the Device Manager already. I had a number of people on another forum tell me that it would make no difference, but it did. As I understood, MS had written it in such a manner that it overrode this setting, because they thought it would slow dissemination of certain viruses, etc. on the internet.

The fact that page loading remains the same, despite the increase in speed of my connection makes me wonder if there is anything in W7 that might have the same effect?

That is the first place that I went after changing the speed, and it does show that the speed is doubled as it should be, but that does not translate into a speed increase for page loading.

EDIT: I also expected an improvement in streaming video, like Hulu and TVU Player, but they are as before, especially with the latter, because I often get distorted, blotchy scenes in films. Hulu is better, but sometimes the video will freeze momentarily. I had thought that these problems were due to connection speed.

Have you tried using a different DNS server? If your new faster connection is running through your same old ISPs cache and filter, maybe there is a bottleneck there. Worth testing anyway.

The speed you "buy" from the ISP relates to up- and download. That has no impact on your browsing speed which depends much more on the number of hoops you have to jump to get to your webpage. Go into cmd and Ping the websites, then you will know how fast they respond. E.g. try this one :

Ping www.yahoo.com

You have to run cmd as admin.

RogerR said:

Have you tried using a different DNS server? If your new faster connection is running through your same old ISPs cache and filter, maybe there is a bottleneck there. Worth testing anyway.

You could try to flush the DNS by doing the following. This may not solve the problem.

Click the start button > All Programs > Accressories.
Right click "Command Prompt" select "Run As Administrator"
Confirm and Accept confirmation pop ups.

Type in the following
ipconfig /flushdns now press enter.

It will look like this when finished
Windows IP Configuration

Successfully flushed the DNS Resolver Cache.

You can now close the Command Prompt window.

That's not what I mean;

DNS Benchmark

I went back to Google DNS, because even though DNS Benchmark says that it is slower than the fastest (Cox), I'm getting somewhat faster page loading with it, but it still is not as fast as I would expect. The best that I remember, it is performing exactly the same with this DNS as it was before increasing my connection speed.

I may be wrong, but I'm still looking for some kind of tweak within W7. I still have a feeling that there is some kind of governor built in.

Guy with a Colt said:

RogerR said:

Have you tried using a different DNS server? If your new faster connection is running through your same old ISPs cache and filter, maybe there is a bottleneck there. Worth testing anyway.

You could try to flush the DNS by doing the following. This may not solve the problem.

Click the start button > All Programs > Accressories.
Right click "Command Prompt" select "Run As Administrator"
Confirm and Accept confirmation pop ups.

Type in the following
ipconfig /flushdns now press enter.

It will look like this when finished
Windows IP Configuration

Successfully flushed the DNS Resolver Cache.

You can now close the Command Prompt window.

I just tried this, and I did find a noticeable increase in speed loading some pages here on the forum. Now I will have to wait to see how long this effect lasts. I had thought that caching DNS addresses should speed up browsing, instead of slowing it. If this does prove to be the answer, how would one set the ipconfig to routinely flush the cache, without me trying to remember to do it myself?