So, I've talked to a few people i know about this, but what are some of the best ways to increase your internet speed, which would include download and upload speeds. Hardware, software, ISP?
If you are torrenting, knowing your speed and settings your software to match those speeds greatly helps with downs and ups. I don't know specifics, but I use uTorrent, and they have a "speedguide" built in with their software, and once I set it using that guide, I went from 20/30 down to about 300/400 down. I'd link some stuff, but its too late - I'll post some tomorrow :] Good luck.
Do a google search for, TCOpitmizer, it basically allows for you make a bigger window to send the data thro and can allow for you to use more of your bandwidth. Also when downloading use a free software like, Free Download Manager. It allows for you to download faster as well as uses error correcting on big files.
What FriendlyFire said will work, but I think it is a moot tool for Vista. Windows XP does have a smaller RWIN and other values compared to what they could be. These changes WILL NOT help your "ping" necessarily, or improve gameplay. It will however open your pipe wide for downloading/streaming. You do have 100% control over your intranet speeds though. You can go with 1 gigabit ethernet, which is relatively inexpensive. Just make sure you get good cables and that all the equipment on your lan is 1 GB capable. It doesn't do you any good to get a 1 GB router/switch and have an ethernet card in your PC that is only 10/100 capable.
Wrong. You do not have 100% control over your Internet speed. If you are running 100Mbit ethernet to your network connection (router or modem) then that is the best you can do to control your speed. The only way you benefit from 1Gbit ethernet is if your Internet connection exceeds 100Mbit/s DL or UL (unlikely) or you regularly transfer enormous files between computers on your network (more likely). If you are not getting your rated DL/UL speed, complain to your ISP. Your ISP has greatly oversold its bandwidth capacity and this is degrading the quality of your service. If your ISP does nothing to fix it, switch ISPs. I've never seen more than a 5% speed increase by using TCPOptimizer. A modern computer can reach its maximum network speed (everything from dialup to 1Gbit ethernet) with the computer's default settings. If the network speed is slowing down (your ISP's fault), changing settings on your computer ignores the actual cause of the problem and does nothing to fix it. In my experience, the biggest cause of Internet slowdowns is a poorly setup computer (dozens of programs or even viruses running in the background, eating up CPU usage, memory, and network usage). Second biggest cause is crappy ISPs. Disclaimer: This is my job.
intra Generally to increase external speeds meaningfully, you're going to need to deal with the ISP, yes.
however, having shitty cabling inside your house could limit internet speed as much as shitty cable lines outside
Well, not to be contentious, but by control, I meant what you can cable, use as hardware, etc. Home users can't do much more than that. I helped implement a 10/100 to 1 Gbit intranet migration for 6 schools, allowing for highly increased performance across the network, even for internet traffic. We only had a 100 Mbit metro ethernet connection, but the workstations still on the 10/100 network were markedly slower. I'm not talking about just browsing or downloading. It was a difference between imaging a PC over the network in 20 minutes or 3.5 minutes. While the bottleneck may be 100 Mbit at the demarc, it still stands to improve general network performance on the local lan, especially since the data bus of more modern PC are faster, and SATA HDD are upwards of 3 GBit. If I wanted to be really picky, I could go so far as to say you DO have 100% control over your LAN speeds, just not for a typical home user. You can allocate and control bandwidth and port speed in a variety of ways. But that is of course just being picky. I'll grant you that TCPOptimizer doesn't do the job it used to do back in the day when we were coming out of the windows 98SE era into XP. I have seen it do wonders for some, because they are customizing their RWIN and such to what works best with their particular ISP and connection. If it didn't work, you wouldn't have sites like DSLReports.com last like they do. Really, if you have a high speed connection, and you are having issues, you should probably do some line monitoring, and see if you are experiencing packet loss at a particular hop belonging to your ISP. It could even be something as discrete as a poorly performing DNS server. A few months ago, cox.net had a misbehaving DNS server that was doing just that. That last point is a good one though. Many folks do not understand the difference between network latency and poorly performing local processing of data. One piece of advice I can give is to troubleshoot the problem from the local node outward. A majority of the time it is something wrong with your PC, then possibly a chronic or temporary issue the ISP is having, and lastly, the server/service that you are interacting with may have issues. They are all separate problem areas that affect the same end point. So points to check: PC - make sure you don't have programs bogging your performance down. excessive memory usage due to large amount of loaded services/programs. That will show itself especially with a game like Aion that already eats up large amounts of memory. Also check Antivirus and firewalls. Modem/Router - A lot of ISPs have made major changes to their infrastructure over the last few years in the race to improve speeds. However, some are notorious for leaving legacy customer premise equipment. Make sure your modem is up to date and that it is in proper working order. I have had several clients in the past with older modems that were not made to deal with the newer frequency being used on their cable network. ISP traceroute - ISP hops only. They cannot control something not on their net. Look especially for backbone hops that show packet loss or high latency. This is where your traffic leaves the ISP and moves on to a big backbone/another ISP. It is a common place for latency and packet loss, especially due to border routing issues, equipment changes. The service you are connecting to - More than likely, you are seeing poor performance because the server you are connecting to is having issues. BTW, This is my job too. I have worked the last 3 years as network admistrator for a school district, installed multi-site VOIP call managers, dealt with ISPs, NOCs, etc. I also teach Cisco classes. While I respect opinions, please don't be so rude as to expect that you may know better just because you work in the industry
Wow okay you guys have been a big help, except that i didn't really get some of the jargin you guys were talking about... packet loss, ethernet (i know wat it is but not in the sense ur using it) and generally about half of malfecto's awesome last post. So to clear up a few question i have: How can i make sure that there aren't programs running in the background? besides going into task manager processes and looking through, since i dont really know my way around there... Increasing my ethernet speed through my cables? is there a certain cable I should be using? how do I know if it won't be compatible with my internet speeds, or whatever it needs to work with. My modem... I have a Siemens speedstream 4100 modem, and a Netgear WGR614 v9 router. Malfecto said to make sure that they work well with each other, but for someone who is generally incompetant about matters like this, how would I know, or how can I check? Thank you guys so much for your help so far. Im just trying to get my computer to run as fast as possible, because I've seen what it looks like when i open Aion, and I dont want to find out I've spent all that money and all this time just for me to have like 3 or 4 FPS the entire game
I just downloaded SG TCP Optimizer for Windows 2000, even though im running Vista... I couldn't find any other versions off Google. I open it up, and I become really confused. Should I be changing something in there? or just leave it alone? let it run all the time?...
Don't use that on Vista. That is basically just a gui for changing registry settings, and they are not the same in Vista as they are in Win2k. I guess, my question would be, what problems are you having? Are you having lag? Low FPS? This is actually easier to do in Vent rather than over the forums.
Well, for instance, I'm running Aion right now, and my vent is so laggy the time between wen i hit my PTT button and when it picks up my voice is a good 5 seconds. I'm pretty sure, and hopeful, that this isn't a problem with my actualy computer. It's fairly new, and it runs most everything just fine.
look I think I can explain the best way to increase your speeds seeing I work for comcast and have a 60 meg dl and 10 upl. this is what you do because software and hardware is poop if it isn't coming in right so what speed test says ur fast so what ipconfig says ur having no packet loss... what u can't see is if your lines or the lines in your negihborhood are having ingress or egress which are data line killers or if there is uncorrected data flowing thru the lines so all who are writing these paragrahs about soft and hard mean nothing unless its coming in ur modem properly if you would like to know more shoot me a pm I'm on a pda so I can't type well or spell right now
^ This.. After switching from DSL to high speed cable/broadband, I noticed a big difference. Roughly the same I would say from going from 28.8kbps dial up to 128k dsl or w/e it was back in the day.
you need to understand that having dsl isn't a constant flow of data cable uses coxial meaning its one direct connection dsl splits into 4 pairs meaning if 1 wire mises a beat ur losing data meaning slower speeds get cable and experience a power u have never felt before