General Question

johnny0313x's avatar

How can I figure out why my internet is so slow?

Asked by johnny0313x (1855points) December 9th, 2009
12 responses
“Great Question” (0points)

I have cable internet and I think it’s 3MB transfer speed?(does that make sense?)

I have a wireless router which my phone and imac use to connect to the internet. Lately my mac has been disconnecting a lot and I have to unplug the modem and wireless in order to get the signal back(usually just unplugging the wireless router will work).

I opened network utility but really don’t know much about it, it was saying:
sent packets: 29k
recv packets: 24k
(both of those constantly change but were staying around those numbers
link speed:54Mbit/s

What can I do to figure out where the slowness is coming from and to stop the disconnect problem?

I have a Belkin wireless router…my guess is a cheap router=poor connection.

Also it’s password protected so I really don’t think anyone else is on it…

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Answers

pjanaway's avatar

Its most likely your router. I have exactly the same problem, I need to buy a new router, current one sucks :)

SeventhSense's avatar

Are you sure it’s clean of nasty spyware, adware, trojans, back door bots, viruses and the like? Have you ruled that out?

zookeeny's avatar

I have the same problem. Seventhsense – how do I clean my comp of spyware etc I keep getting a message that says my virtual memory is low – I am thinking that spyware and tojans might be the problem. I do click clean disk button or something every now and then but is there more I could do to get the computer working faster? – sorry kind of hijaked the question but its related…

johnny0313x's avatar

I just ran a scan on my computer yesterday and it came up clean, so I don’t think that is the problem. My computer isn’t so much going slow…just the internet mostly. Right now it’s actually working okay, just sometimes it gets choppy.

pjanaway's avatar

Adaware is good for cleaning adware and spyware!

SeventhSense's avatar

The best spyware and adware removal tools are hands down Malwarebytes and Lavasoft Ad Aware

SeventhSense's avatar

@johnny0313x
If it’s a cable connection it may signal loss or too many splits. Check with the cable company but connect it directly first without the router. Might be the router

jrpowell's avatar

@SeventhSense :: They are using a Mac.

@johnny0313x :: My bet is that the router is shitty or is dieing. And Apple just released a update for Airport in the last few days. I would run Software Update and see if it helps.

And are you running any file sharing programs? Sometimes your upload will choke your download and it will slow things down giving the illusion that your connection is having a problem.

arpinum's avatar

Cheap routers can easily overheat. Make sure the box gets enough ventilation or consider buying a better router.

ratboy's avatar

@zookeeny: virtual memory is a portion of your disk drive. Low virtual memory might mean that your disk is filled to near capacity, or it could be that too little disk space has been allocated to virtual memory.

ben's avatar

A great way to test if your router is the problem is to test your internet connection wired (plugged directly into your modem). You’ll probably have to reset your modem once plugged it’s in to your computer, but that’s a sure fire test (with router vs. without). You can go to speedtest.net to do a simple test.

I recently upgraded a crappy router to the expensive Apple Airport Extreme, and the results have been impressive: 5–10x speed, much better range,

DAVETHERAV1D's avatar

Id go on google.com, key in spybot search and destroy, then download it for free, run the program once its installed on your computer, it will search all your files for any problems and then once its done you click on a button that says fix problems, it will remove all the problems its found, then you should gain more speed,after you have done this, download super anti spyware free edition just like you did with spybot, run the program and it will find more problems, fix them and that should help your computer alot, every few weeks run the programs and they will find the odd problem each time and remove them.

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