Is Your Comcast Connection
Choking On Miniscule YouTube Videos and Other Downloads?
Here is a possible solution:
by John Thielking
2-17-08
Comcast is now advertising download speeds of
up to 16 MB/sec and they are asking AT&T to "fold". Does this
advertisement represent reality or is Comcast blowing smoke? I say they
are blowing smoke. I have no love for AT&T, what with their
alleged illegal wiretapping of Americans at the behest of the Bush
administration. However, AT&T's 6MB/sec download speed is
apparently better than Comcast's download speed, when dowloading actual
files or actual videos. I have noticed that there is an easy
work-around to solve the problem of Comcast slowing down the download
of a YouTube video. The solution is
to move the mouse pointer continously back and forth over the edges of
the video display of the YouTube video as it appears on your monitor
screen. I have noticed that when downloading the "Happy
Christmas" video on http://www.imaginepeace.com,
sometimes Comcast will download the video at the same speed as the
video is supposed to play back, leading to gaps and bubbles in the
playback, as the speed match is not quite perfect. If you hit replay,
the video will play again without downloading again, and without any
gaps and bubbles. If you go to the list of videos at the bottom of the
YouTube screen and download the video a second time, it may stop
downloading completely for a minute or so at a time. It was at this
point that I discovered that moving the mouse pointer back and forth so
that the pointer travels alternately inside and outside the
viewscreen display of the YouTube video causes the download to resume
at full speed, faster even than the initial download speed. If you look
carefully you can see the grey bar which indicates the progress of the
download moving faster than the red playback bar. You have to keep the
mouse pointer moving while the download proceeds to get the maximum
benefit from this techique. I suppose AT&T should come out
with a commercial that has someone watching their Comcast download,
like the Mr Slowsky turtle, waiting and waiting for the download to
actually proceed.
If you have success with this technique, please e-mail John Thielking
at pagesincolor@riseup.net so I can keep this page updated.
Please let me know if the mouse pointer technique works for you when
downloading YouTube videos or if it works for any other types of
downloads on Comcast. If you are a software developer, you might
look into what is really getting reset when the mouse pointer moves
over the YouTube video and develop a small program to continuously
reset your computer software to fool Comcast into actually delivering
their advertised download speeds.
Have You Tried Every Spyware Deleting
Program in the World But Your Computer Is Still Running Too Slow?
Then Try This: Or; How to get an Old Geezer computer to run like a 2
year old
by John Thielking
12-20-07
For quite some time now I had a problem with my old Windows 98 PC
computer. It was running slower and slower and web surfing was almost
at a standstill. Each web page would take up to five minutes to
load. I thought “This system is finished, I'll have to get a new
computer just to surf the web.” I could not afford to get a new
computer. So what to do? Then I tried one little idea. I
did not download any software upgrades or any anti-spyware or
anti-virus programs. My hard drive was full so I couldn't think of
doing that anyway. Instead, I called one tech support person for one of
my isp's to confirm how to do what I wanted to do. The
technician thought I was confused and said that I needed to have
a service call where another technician would do a frequency test of my
modem. I asked the technician, “Please just tell me how to [do this one
thing] to my system.” I tried what was suggested to get the change that
I wanted. After rebooting my Windows 98 computer, now it surfs
the web like it had been transformed into a 2007 model computer.
Text only web pages take 5 seconds or less to load and I am in web
surfing heaven. When I was having trouble web surfing, this also
affected the operation of other programs. Typing this message in my
word processor or e-mail user interface would have taken over an hour
as the disk drive was spinning endlessly and causing every keystroke to
be rendered individually over the course of up to one minute.
That problem is gone now too. My Win 98 PC still takes 15 minutes
to boot up, but once that is done there are no other significant speed
problems not normally expected on a system this old.
Solution:
The solution is in two parts and is relatively simple. I
discovered the solution to this problem of slow web surfing while
trying to figure out if my Comcast connection was primarily responsible
for the slow web surfing. I had two isp's available at two different
locations. I had an AT&T 6MB DSL connection available at my
retail store and a Comcast High Speed Internet connection available at
my apartment. My Win 98 computer at my apartment was running really
slow and surfing the web really slow. The disk drive would spin
endlessly and I could not download a single e-mail through Internet
Explorer while logged in to AOL's web browsing interface. I did try
Mozilla Firefox and that seemed to work better for a little while. I
was able to access and download AOL e-mail at the apartment using
Mozilla Firefox. But even that was really slow after awhile.
So I unplugged my Win 98 computer and hauled the whole thing over to my
retail store and set it up on the ATT 6MB DSL connection. Then
everything worked great. I noticed that at the beginning of the day the
system would surf the web really fast, taking less than 5 seconds to
load most text only web pages. By the end of the day, however, although
the system was still working better than at the apartment, it was
slowing down significantly.
I took the computer back to the apartment and set it up on the Comcast
connection. It worked great. The surfing speed on text only web pages
was the same as it was at the store in the morning.
At that point I became suspicious of two things:
1) The improvement in speed could be related to
changing the ip address of the computer when its physical location was
changed. I don't know how spyware works, but it is possible that
the spyware may need to know where it is sending info from or something
like that before it starts to slow down the system.
2) The subsequent slowing down of the system over a
few hours could be related to surfing to a specific web site or web
sites.
I investigated this further by doing and encountering the following:
I went to http://projectbypass.com/,
which is a website that disguises your ip address. Clicking on a link
on that page brought me to http://www.hide-my-ip.com/?id=167
where I could verify what my ip address was. I decided to go back
to projectbypass.com and try their free web surfing web interface to
see if it would really hide my true ip address. I input http://www.hide-my-ip.com/?id=167
into the web address input field and sure enough the
hide-my-ip.com web page I surfed to said that my ip address
appeared to be different.
Then everything blew up in my face. I used the projectbypass.com anonymous
surfing utility to attempt to log in to AOL's web interface. AOL
crashed the projectbypass.com program and forced my web browser to show
aol.com as the real site that I was surfing to (ie my true ip address
was revealed to AOL). I was able to log in to AOL and look at a
few e-mails, while the system started running a bit slower. Then I went
to my usual text only web site (riseup.net) and attempted to log in to
my e-mail account there. The disk drive started spinning endlessly and
the web browser wouldn't budge to get me to the next web page so I
could log in. So here I was, back at the condition I called
“ultimate slowness”. I punched the power button on my PC and
decided to call Comcast in the morning to see if they could tell me how
to change the ip address that my computer was using without hauling it
back to the store.
In the morning, I found out from Comcast that all I needed to do to
change my ip address was to unplug the power to my router, let it sit
for a bit, and then plug it back in. The system that dynamically
assigns ip addresses on Comcast will then assign a new ip address.
Apparently this process worked, because when I turned on my computer it
was back to surfing the Internet at speeds of 5 seconds or less per web
page. There were still a few hangups such as occasionally taking
a few seconds to allow me to start typing, but the system performance
was much better than before. The disk drive still has a few instances
of spinning for awhile while the system won't let me type, but this
lasts for 10 seconds or so at most and then it lets me type like it was
an up to date 2007 model PC.
The second part of this procedure is to note websites that cause your
PC to suddenly slow down. AOL is on this list for now. So my
advice is that after you perform the above system fix, don't surf to
aol.com, unless you want to be back where you started (which is easy to
fix on Comcast: Just unplug your router for a few moments and then
reboot your system.)
For other service providers, you might have to call tech support to
find out how to reset your ip address. If they don't know how or won't
tell you or they don't offer this service, then set up your computer at
a friend's house for a few minutes using your friend's Internet
connection to get the system to think it has a new ip address and then
take it back to the old location. Or you might also try disconnecting
just the Ethernet cable and/or disabling the wireless connection and
then connect to the Internet only using your back-up dial-up to get a
new ip address temporarily. Then switch back to using the high speed
connection. (If I remember right, dial up was always slow but it
never got any slower via spyware, probably because the ip address was
assigned each time I connected.) In doing my testing, I noticed
that the spyware or whatever it is that is messing with the hard drive
is dumb enough that it apparently can't remember a previously used ip
address, in the case where I switched back and forth between two ip
addresses.
Note that some business programs require a fixed ip address to function
properly, so this quick fix may slow you down a little while you update
your software to use the new ip address, unless you use a program such
as the one available at http://www.klcconsulting.net/smac/default.htm
to switch or spoof the ip address to a new one temporarily to lose the
spyware and then switch it back to use the old ip address to run your
business programs without any further interruption. This last
idea (spoofing the ip address instead of really changing it) has not
been tested, so please let me know if it works or doesn't work.
Happy Surfing!
John Thielking
Pagesincolor.com
pagesincolor@riseup.net
Pagesincolor.com
1346 The Alameda, Suite 7-318
San Jose, CA 95126 USA
408-914-2751
info@pagesincolor.com