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Troubleshooting your internet connection.You have a nice shiny modem, top of the range computer and the fastest ISP on the planet, but your connection speed is still in single figures. It's the Net's fault, right? Not necessarily. Roger Gann tells you how you can get the most out of your modem Show me someone who says their Internet connection is plenty fast enough, and I'll show you someone who's being economical with the truth. It doesn't matter how fast your Net connection is, it's rarely ever fast enough. Some lucky souls now have always-on broadband connections, but the vast majority of us, myself included, still have to make do with ye olde dial-up. While you'll never get a V.90 modem to break the sound barrier, there are a number of steps you can take to boost the speed of your Internet connection. Your Net connection speed is determined by a number of factors, and how well they all work together: * Computer-its hardware and memory capacity determine how fast it will be. * Modem speed -- cable modems through to slow modems. * Phone lines--the weather, believe it or not, is a factor. * Service provider-the number of people using your ISP and the speed of the IS P's connection to the Net. * The Internet backbone -- congestion or technical problems can ruin your online experience. * Web sites you're connecting to-they're subject to the same factors as you. You don't have much influence over the last three, but you can do something about the first three. Usually, the only way to speed up your computer involves spending hard-earned cash. But the good news is that the second and third items can be dealt with at a cost of precisely nothing. If you're looking to tweak your connection to the absolute maximum, you have to be willing to invest the time necessary to test, then change settings, then retest, then change settings, and so on. Luckily, there are tools available to make the process easier. You might not have any control over the performance of the internet beyond your phone socket, but it's possible to use simple diagnostics to track down where your Internet problem lies. Have you ever logged on to the Internet and were not able logo to a particular site? Or maybe it was unusually slow that day? Windows 9X comes with two small but useful utilities, Ping and Tracert, that can help you gauge the quality of the connection between your computer and the Web site that you are trying to reach on the Internet. Both Ping and Tracert, which is short for TraceRoute, show you how fast or slow the Internet is between your computer and the computer you're trying to reach. Ping will tell you if the computer you're trying to contact is responding, and Tracert will find exactly where the problem is if you can't get to that Web page you need. Both utilities are installed, by default in the \Windows \Command folder, These are DOS utilities and so have to be run from a Command prompt- the easiest way to do this is to click Start, Programs then MS-DOS Prompt. To explain what a Ping is, let's use an analogy. Suppose you called one of your friends on the phone. If your friend stays silent for some time, you might ask, "Are you there?" and your friend should reply with, "I'm here!". That's a human-to-human ping. The Ping command is similar for two computers. All Ping does is ask the computer at the other end to respond.
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