Hi, I hope you can help. I have a windows 8 pc. Has 4 GB of RAM & made by Gateway. I (think) I know how to keep a pc running well. Not many background programs on, free of virus & disc defragged. I am using a Netgear router & have tried the ethernet & wireless connections What's driving me crazy is how slow internet browsing is. I have Cablevision & if I check the speed it clocks in at 20Mbps downloads, which sounds good. But every website I go to takes 10 or more seconds to load. And if I have 2 browser windows open it reminds me of the dial up days. My PS4 browser is about 3 or 4 times faster. Is this a Windows 8 thing? I would appreciate any suggestions or insights you may have to try & improve this. Thanks so much! D
I don't think this is a Windows issue. You see, my first internet (back in 2010) was a 5 Mbit connection, it worked fine everyday and I downloaded things at 580 KB/s. But then in 2012 I did an upgrade to 10 Mbit, which in theory should give me 1300 KB/s of download speed. For the first days it worked fine, but then I started noticing my connection was only working fine between 12AM and 12PM; any minute less or more and I would download at 10% of my speed, 120 KB/s. After doing an investigation I came to the conclusion that my ISP was doing Traffic Shaping on me, so I decided to take action. I e-Mailed the 3 Senators of my State and they send me copies of numerous Legal books for free (I didn't even pay shipping), including the one that got my situation solved: "Código de Defesa do Consumidor" (translating: Consumer's Code of Defense). So I studied this book a little and thought I was ready to confront my ISP. And I was right At one point one person on one of highest position at the company called, and I said: "I know you're doing TS on this city and probably on the whole country. So either you give my connection back to the state where it was working fine, or I'll joing every single person that uses your internet in this town and we're gonna have a very bad day at Court because many people will prove that this happens to them as well". The result? My connection has been working wonderfully since, and they even cut my bill from 129BRL to 59BRL without asking me This was the SECOND time this happened. The first time it happened the problem was in the Modem they provided, so I suggest you to try your PC on other connections at first (connections that don't have any relation to yours). If your internet speed is still fine, then try convincing a friend to bring his/her modem into your home and connecting it on your cables, if the connection speed is slow this could indicate that the cables that bring the connection from the street to your house have a problem. This friend of yours could also bring his/her laptop to your house to test their machine on your connection. Then, if everything is working (aside from your connection with your modem), try to notice if your speed is slow only on a few services like P2P or if the speed is only at it's fullest on a certain period of time.
Although browsing is mostly download, available upload bandwidth is important to smooth browsing. (This is why it is a good idea to throttle cloud storage and how OneDrive, lacking a throttle option, will kill browsing by saturating upstram bandwidth during file uploads.) What @amarildojr said is also true: your available throughput dropping during peak times. Since your PS4 is fine, you may want to look at your browser itself (which one are you using?) and extensions, if any. Basically, troubleshoot the browser first, the device next since your other device is working fine. Edit: Run CCleaner too.
Other suggestions: 1. Try various portable browsers to see if your problem is browser specific. 2. You could download a Linux distro to run on a USB stick (e.g. through unetbootin) and see if the problem is OS specific.
