Slow internet speeds can be very frustrating and can certainly ruin your online experience, especially if you’re waiting over a minute for a page to load! Sometimes slow loading times can be out of our hands and I’m going to go over the most common causes for a slow internet connection and what you can try to do to improve it.

1: Poor Internet Service Provider connectivity – Sometimes your ISP can be responsible for your slow internet. You can usually determine this by monitoring your speeds throughout the day, are you getting fast speeds late at night and early in the morning? If you are and the slow speeds your getting are mainly in the afternoon and evening then chances are you ISP has oversubscribed, this is a term used to describe when too many users are on the same segment at once. This causes a bottleneck and therefore slow speeds.

Solution: If this is the case then get in touch with your ISP, explain the problem, be patient as you are likely to get through to their customer service department and depending on the ISP they can range from useless to slightly helpful. Explain that the issue you’re having is only at certain times of the day. If you feel your getting nowhere ask to speak to a manager. Sadly your last hope might be to get a new ISP. Check online reviews to see who offers the best service in your country.

2: Bandwidth theft – If you are running a wireless network then it is quite possible somebody is stealing your bandwidth.

Solution: This is very typical for unsecured wireless networks so make sure you have a strong wireless key. Always use WPA security and never WEP, WEP can be hacked very easily, with a long and complex WPA passphrase it will be almost impossible to break into your wireless network

3: Poor Wireless connection – A common cause that is often overlooked. So many people are on wireless networks nowadays and although it is very convenient it is also more susceptible to interference and signals problems.

Solution: To establish whether this is happening try using a wired connection into your router, if your speeds are fine then chances are you are suffering from a poor wireless signal. If this is the case then establish whether you have a range problem or not. You can usually tell this by checking your signal strength. If the strength is good then consider changing your wireless channel to 1, 6 or 11 (these are ‘non-overlapping’ channels).

4: Faulty hardware – This can be a faulty network card (wired or wireless), a faulty network cable or even a faulty router and or switch.

Solution: Ideally you are going to need access to another computer or laptop and router. Check the other computer first with another cable and wireless card, if the problem persists then try changing the router over. By doing this you are checking all the network hardware and proving whether it is faulty or not.

5: Spyware and malware – There are plenty of types of malware and spyware that can severely affect your internet speeds. This usually occurs when they intercept internet traffic to redirect you to different web pages; the extra overheads caused by this will severely impact the speeds you’re getting. They can alter your dns and proxy servers to rogue ones which are usually located in countries like Russia and China. The extra latency caused by your computer contacting them will reduce speeds also. Finally some malware and spyware can be used to steal your bandwidth for one of many reasons, and what will this result in? Yep, you guessed it, slow internet speeds.

Solution: You should make sure you have an up to date anti virus and anti malware solution on your system. Make sure your getting regular updates and run a full scan with a program like Malwarebytes or Stopzilla. You can also try rebooting into safe mode with networking and see if the problem persists. If it doesn’t then chances are there is a program or piece of malware on your system that is slowing the internet down (the said program or malware will more than likely not load in safe mode).

Remember that sometimes websites can load slowly because they are under heavy load. If only one or two sites are slow and the rest are fine then chances are this is the problem. Regardless, by following the above you can successfully troubleshoot your internet connection and hopefully speeds things up if they are running slow.

One of the cool new features of Windows 7 is the snipping tool. If you’ve ever needed to send a screenshot to somebody or you’ve needed to get a small portion of the screen into a jpeg then the standard procedure is to do a print screen, load up paint, paste the image in, crop it, save it and send it! This is all made a whole lot easier with the snipping tool.

Once you load the snipping tool up your mouse cursor turns into a selector tool that will allow you to click and drag to highlight a portion of the screen. Once you’ve done this the snipping tool will automatically paste it into a new window like so:

Once you’ve got the image you get to do some basic editing on it. You have a handy little pencil tool that will allow you to draw or write something onto the image in various different colours. You also get a highlighter tool to highlight certain areas of importance. Check out my masterpiece below:

You can then save your image as a png, gif, jpeg or mht (single file html). Another handy feature is you can send the image direct to your email client.

Little extra programs like this make Windows 7 a very definite improvement over Windows XP (and of course Vista, but that isn’t hard, is it?). The snipping tool will definitely save time for those who frequently have to take screenshots and it will allow you to quickly crop, edit and send the images on without having to load up paint.

Maintaining a computer is an important part of ensuring that your system is constantly running at its optimal performance. Without regular maintenance you are bound to experience slow response times, errors and worse case scenario – system crashes that could lead to data loss. You don’t have to be a computer guru to perform basic maintenance and by following the tips below you can make sure that you’re taking care of your computer and keeping it running smooth and error free.

Data maintenance – Your data is everything that resides on your hard drive(s). This includes your files (media, documents etc) and also your programs. A very full hard drive will not run at its best performance. This is for two reasons, firstly the fragmentation level will be high, this means that files will be scattered around the hard drive and seek times will be slower. This can be improved somewhat through regular defragmentation, however, when a hard drive becomes very full the data is stored on the outer heads of the hard drive, these take longer to seek to than the inner heads and by keeping your hard drive less full you can improve read times.

Consider this – Google use custom hardware for their server farm and were reported to only fill their hard drives up by a small amount to ensure that data is kept in the inner heads and is therefore quicker to read from. So by deleting old files that you no longer need and removing old programs you no longer use you can ensure that your hard drive is running at optimal level.

Whilst on the subject of hard drives it’s a good idea to regularly fragment it, especially if there is a lot of activity on the drive. If you are constantly writing to and deleting from the drive then heavy fragmentation can occur which can result in slow read times, by defragmenting regularly you can ensure that this doesn’t happen.

It’s also a good idea to run a regular check disk. This can be done with the chkdsk /r command In a dos prompt, or by right clicking on your hard drive in my computer, choosing properties, then tools and click on the ‘error checking’ or ‘scandisk’ button. Make sure you tick the ‘check for bad sectors’ box (You may well have to restart the computer to allow Windows to properly run the scan). If you regularly check the drive for bad sectors you are ensuring that it is error free and functioning properly. If there do happen to be bad sectors on there then Windows will mark them as bad and they will not be used. If this doesn’t happen then data could potentially be written to them and this can cause data loss or unresponsive loading of programs and files.

System Maintenance – Windows is perhaps not well known for its error free operation and there can be times well you get spontaneous crashes or very bizarre behaviour. Windows 7 is a definite improvement in this department but you might still find yourself dealing with crashes and errors from time to time. To help prevent this it is best to stay on top of Windows updates, a lot of updates will probably never affect you but there are always some that will fix instability issues that the Microsoft team is aware of so its good practice to keep Windows update on.

Another very important part of maintaining your computer is frequent malware and virus scans. Make sure you’ve got a decent anti virus suite (avira, avast or Kaspersky are my recommendations) and also a good anti spyware and malware solution (malwarebytes or Stopzilla are both very good). Spyware and malware can wreak havoc on your computer; they can slow things down by running extra background processes and by hijacking search engine results. Of course these are just two of the potential issues caused by them so it’s definitely something you want to keep off your computer!

Finally another good place to look is the msconfig tool. This comes built in to all versions of Windows (after 2000) and can be used by clicking on start > run and then typing in msconfig (vista and 7 users can type this into the search box). The tab were interested in is the start-up tab. Here you can disable programs that start up on your computer. Not only will this improve your computer start-up time but it will also free up some valuable virtual memory that will ensure the legitimate programs you do use have more available memory.