Slow browsing speed (firefox/explorer)

[RECOiL™]

Hello,

Im on 20mbit ntl broadband and have just recentley rebuilt my pc with xp-pro sp2. the os is fully updated, im running nod32 and windows firewall with default options. My cable modem goes into a router which then distributes the internet to the lan.

My download speeds (whilst sucky) are fine as what ive come to expect from ntl, but i have noticed something which is concerning me even more. When browsing the net, some pages take ages to load and even time out. I then find myself having to refresh the page a couple of times for it to load up!

I've installed a broadband optimizer (tcp-tweaker) hoping that this would make a difference, but to no avail. Im, going to try the firefox tweaks, but i wonder what else can i do to ensure that im getting the best possible browsing/downloading speeds possible.

regards

[Lee H]

have you tried using another set of DNS servers to see if the issue lies with NTL ?

Try these and see if they speed the browsing up

Preferred DNS server address for Open DNS is: 208.67.222.222

Alternate DNS server address for Open DNS is: 208.67.220.220

[mountainmachine]

I used to have huge problems with my ntl cable line, swaping servers seemed to help me in the past. Granted that was back in the days of 2meg.

[Jay]

I also have this issue on their 20Mb service. OpenDNS solved it for me, VM DNS servers are really bad.

[RECOiL™]

Thank you for this, i will try those dns servers. Im currentley using

194.168.4.100
194.168.8.100

Do you think changing the dns servers will increase my download speed times or purely just the browsing ?

[bobbyzero]

Faster DNS will speed up the looking up of websites, but not the actual transfers from them.

[Lourdes]

If you want even better DNS and no hijackaing from OpenDNS then grab treewalk - TreeWalk DNS Downloads . So much better than relying on other DNS servers and you don't need to configure or do anything.

[Instinct]

What do you mean by OpenDNS hijacking ? I have always found OpenDNS to be an excellent service.

[peterb]

Hmm - I tried open DNS and found look-up times for some sites to be noticeably slower than my own ISP (Zen) DNS servers. Worse, they wouldn't resolve some sites at all, whereas ZEN had no problem.

[Instinct]

Thats interesting. Whats treewalk exactly then? A Local DNS Cache?