MakeUseOf » bandwidth

PRTG Monitor – A Free Bandwidth Meter For PCs In Your Home Network

Ryan Dube — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 21:31:29 +0000

Have you ever been in a situation where your Internet is just dragging along, while you know that you’re the only person on your network, and you’re hardly using any bandwidth?

There are plenty of tools out there that will help you with analyzing your home network and assist you with increasing your Internet speeds on that network. You could use Networx, a tool Karl covered, to measure the individual bandwidth of each PC. You could go through some of the network speed tests that Matt described. Then you could follow Tina’s tips to increase your Internet speeds.

In this article, I’m going to offer you a very cool centralized solution that you can run on a single PC (or server), which will go out and monitor your entire network for traffic and performance issues.

Monitor Your Entire Network With PRTG Monitor

If you stop and think about it, to get a true measurement about the health of your network, you really need to monitor not only the traffic going in and out of just one PC on the network. You should also be constantly monitoring each connected device for any problems. Such problems could be recognizing when the CPU goes haywire, when network bandwidth stays pegged at the max, or any other factors that indicate there could be a virus or hacking involved.

The PRTG Monitor software is a commercial tool, but there is a great freeware version available to home users that provides monitoring for up to 10 “sensors”. For most home users, this is more than sufficient.

You can run PRTG on more than one server for a “cluster” mode, but the easiest and fastest setup is to run it on one server in “standalone mode”.

The first screen you’ll see after you set up PRTG and launch the software, is the main menu where you can quickly access the major areas of the monitor software. This includes manually adding devices to monitor, reviewing status results in log files and reports, or having the software perform “network discovery” to locate any devices connected to your network.

Manually adding devices lets you configure little details that the automatic discovery won’t do, like customizing the icon for that device or giving it a name that you will recognize.

All you have to do is type in the known network IP address for that device. At the top of the Network Monitor screen is where you’ll find the quick navigation bar. This is where you can go to view the sensor statuses, view all network alarms, reports and logs.

The alarm area will show you all of the latest alarm messages for all of the devices on your network. These might include notifications that the CPU on a PC or device has gone through the roof, or the fact that the space on the C: drive is dangerously low. The system is looking for the sort of symptoms that indicate an unhealthy or infected system.

Of course, if you scroll over to the right when you view the device status, you’ll see the last measured network bandwidth for that device as well – an important indicator that there may be a problem, or that you have someone on your network that’s stealing all of your bandwidth!

The “Live Data” graphs off to the right of the main display screen are my favorite part of the software. Here you can keep an eye on the CPU load, memory use and overall health of all of the devices on your home network. And if you don’t want to sit there monitoring everything all day, the software will log the data and provide you with graphs for different time intervals, like the last few days or the last month.

The overview screen for each device is where you can get access to that information, as well as the log files, alarm notifications, and all of the realtime information for that device.

You also get cool notification icons that highlight when there’s an active alarm or notification for any device on your network. Each icon has a different meaning – informational, warning, or alarm. Just click on the icon to see those notifications.

If you want a closer view of the device behaviors, just click on any of the graphs and it’ll switch into full-screen mode. If you are the type of person that likes to have realtime statistics up on your screen (especially if you use an extended monitor) – go ahead and connect to the server remotely, and just display these graphs right on your screen (plus it looks really cool when people walk by…)

The logs will provide you with a huge volume of system state changes, alarm notifications and just status reports about what’s going on throughout your network and from each device. I’ve never seen freeware that is quite this effective and useful when it comes to getting really valuable information about a network, or remotely monitoring device like this. I’m really impressed with this software.

Try installing it on one of your more powerful home PCs and give it a try, or set up a dedicated server for monitoring your network health, and just let it run and log data. You may be surprised at what the software discovers, and what it tells you about where you may be losing bandwidth to runaway processes or infected computers.

Give it a shot and let us know how well it worked for your network. Did you learn anything new? Share your experiences with it in the comments section below.

Image Credit : Shutterstock

How To Meter & Manage Computer Bandwidth Usage

Matt Smith — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:31:58 +0000

Unlimited bandwidth is the dream of every geek, but unfortunately, it’s not always available. Caps are one way for service providers to squeeze extra money out of existing services, so there have been many attempts to introduce them, some of which have stuck.

If you’re on a cap, it’s important to know how much bandwidth you’re using. Sometimes a provider will give you a meter for free, but if that’s not the case, you’ll need to check out a few freeware computer bandwidth usage management tools.

Keeping Up With Downloads

Monitoring bandwidth manually is virtually impossible. Individual webpages don’t report their size readily, and even if they did, there are many variables such as streaming content, automatically refreshing news feeds, and more. Software downloads are not much better. Yes, you can usually see the file size, but sometimes those files are just downloaders rather than full installers, and even if it is the full software, it may need to download an update. How do you keep track of that?

The only way is to use a bandwidth meter that works by detecting everything, from every application, process and service on your computer.

For Windows users, I suggest NetWorx. This free software offers a wide variety of features that will help you keep tabs on your Internet usage. It can report and graph your bandwidth usage by day, week, month, year, or a custom time period.

Also included is a bandwidth speed test and, perhaps most useful of all, a quota feature. This lets you set a daily, weekly or month allowance for bandwidth. An alert can be configured to appear when a certain percentage so you know when you need to back off the download button.

Mac Can Do It, Too

Mac OS X users can use SkoobySoft’s SurplusMeter. It’s a more basic tool than NetWorx, as the reporting options are less flexible and it doesn’t have an automatic quota alert, but it does its job and, like NetWorx, it is entirely free. Please note that SurplusMeter is not on the Mac App Store at the time of this writing. This utility has been around for a while, but it seems to work fine on my MacBook with OS X Lion installed.

Although these are very useful tools, I wasn’t able to find one that reports bandwidth for all computers in a home network collectively. Tools with this capability are available, but they’re focused on an enterprise environment rather than a home network.

Respecting Your Limits

Now that you have a bandwidth meter, you may be wondering what you can do to reduce the amount that you use. I do have a few tips.

Don’t Watch HD Video – pixel count in an image goes up exponentially as resolution increases. A video at 360p has 194,400 pixels, but one at 720p has 921,600 pixels, and 1080p is a jaw-dropping 2,073,600 pixels. Compression techniques do reduce bandwidth consumption, but there’s no getting around the fact that low-resolution video is more efficient.
Buy Retail Versions Of Software In-Store Whenever Possible – yes, it’s convenient to purchase a new title of Steam, but a game with modern 3D graphics can easily weigh in at over 10GB.
Use A Firewall – and don’t provide software with permission to automatically bypass it. This will prevent programs from downloading automatic updates without your knowledge.

One tactic that doesn’t provide much benefit is Flash-blocking, script-blocking, or ad-blocking. Using browser extensions to stop this content often does not prevent the content from being sent to your computer. It just simply isn’t displayed. In addition, the amount of bandwidth used by Flash and its competitors is typically small unless it is being used to display high-definition video or play an online game.

Do you have any top computer bandwidth usage management tips? Well, that’s what the comments section is for! I quite like the software discussed in this article – particularly NetWorx – but readers are welcome to provide their own suggestions.

Image Credit: Wikipedia Commons, What About Plastic Animals?

Play Low Bandwidth Online Games With Gamezer

Dave LeClair — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 00:31:40 +0000

Everyone loves games. When you think of ways to kill time, games are one of the higher ranking activities. Whether at work, at home, or on the train, games are an important parts of our life.

Gamzer is here to make playing low-bandwidth games quick and easy with 4 games available from their free service. They offer Pool, Chess, Checkers and Gladiator. All 4 of these games are played against the computer or another real person. We have covered websites that feature online pool and chess before, and Gamezer hopes to take your attention away and keep all your online gaming focused on their service that offers both, plus checkers and Gladiator.

Allow me to preface this with a little explanation of why someone would be interested in low-bandwidth games. Some Internet service providers don’t offer an unlimited plan, so users have to pay for the service based on how much data they actually use. By using a service like Gamezer they are able to still have fun playing online games, but aren’t forced into using a massive amount of data and racking up a huge bill.

Another reason someone may be particularly interested in low-bandwidth games is because they have a very slow Internet connection. If your Internet connection is slow, waiting for a high resolution 3D game to stream can take forever, and that is frustrating.

Registration

To begin playing games on Gamezer you have to register, which is a snap. Simply go to the main page and click the “play now” button or the link for whichever of the 4 games you would like to play. You will then be taken to the page where you can log in or register a new account. The link to register is on the right side of the page.

After clicking on the register button you will taken to a screen to enter in your information such as your email address, language, password, and of course a “CAPTCHA” to make sure you are human.

Finding A Game

After you complete the registration process, your next goal will be to play some games. This process is easy enough, but it is not nearly as streamlined as it could be. Once you click the game you want to play you are taken to a screen to choose a lobby. You’ll want to look for one that has less than 130 people, since that is their maximum. If you choose “National Rooms” you can play with only people from your country.

Once in a lobby you can click “new game” to start a game against a computer opponent, or you can browse the area on the left side of the screen and invite another person to play. I find it kind of odd that there is no option for quickly being matched against another real live opponent who is looking to play. This can make finding a game a little more challenging than is necessary. That said, it never took me more than a couple of minutes to find a game, even if it isn’t the most streamlined process.

To actually invite a user, simply click the little arrow next to their name and wait for their response.

Quality Of Games

Gamezer’s bread and butter is definitively their pool game. That is where most of the players are, and that is the game with the best quality. The game doesn’t look great graphically, but that’s acceptable because of the nature of a low-bandwidth service such as this. The lower graphics allow the game to stream quickly, and without using much data.

The physics are good, and the balls move like you would expect them to. The chess and checkers games are also good, the Gladiator game however, not so much. It’s basically a 2D fighter, where you hack your sword at your opponent until one of you is longer standing. I played one full game of Gladiator, and decided my time was better spent playing one of the three other offerings on the site. However, being able to play an action based game such as this, while keeping your data usage low will certainly benefit many people.

Other Features

Gamezer features a very nice leader board so you can see how the best players in the world are doing. This is one area where Gamezer really beats out a lot of similar services. Most services of this type don’t keep track of your records or stats, so the games never seem to have any real sense of consequence. Being able to keep track of your performances keeps Gamezer competitive with other browser based gaming services.

Major Flaw

Gamezer has one flaw that really hurt me. I think this image speaks for itself.

As an avid Google Chrome user this upset me a great deal, and it pained me to have to dig out Firefox to check out the games. Hopefully the folks at Gamezer add support for Chrome down the line.

Conclusion

If you are in a situation where you need to play games while using as little data as possible, I think Gamezer just might be the service for you.

What free browser-based gaming services do you use? Have you used Gamezer before? What is your opinion? Let us know in the comments below.

How To Use Microemulator To Use The Internet From Low-Bandwidth Rural Areas [Windows]

Ryan Dube — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 21:31:33 +0000

For years, our family has traveled to a remote camp in the wilderness of central Maine in the United States in order to escape for a relaxing weekend of swimming, hiking and lots of great holiday food. However, being an online writer, it isn’t always easy to get away from technology for an extended time. At the very least, it’s important to be able to check email and occasionally submit a quick blog post or two.

While many people set up their mobile phone – such as rooting an Android, for example – to allow for tethering and accessing the cellular data network with a PC, it is a practice that is generally frowned upon by the mobile providers. However, there are times when you’re just desperate for Internet access, and you need the larger screen that your laptop offers.

In previous articles, I’ve described how you can tether your rooted Android phone to your laptop, and Dave described how you can tether a jailbroken iPhone in much the same way. My preferred method of tethering is using the awesome Wireless tether app that I mentioned recently.

Installing The Emulator

Once you have that tether enabled, and you’ve got your Wireless data Internet connection activated on your phone, the following guide will help you to conserve bandwidth so that you won’t draw too much attention to yourself while surfing.

The first step is to install a mobile phone emulator – a few options include using the Android developer SDK that has an emulator tool, or you can install the Sun Java Wireless Toolkit from Sun which includes a good emulator as well. The simplest solution is to install the MicroEmulator program to your PC.

You will need Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed on your system (if you don’t already). When you launch the MicroEmulator, it won’t look like anything at all special at first. It basically looks like a cellphone with a mobile screen. First, make sure you’ve enabled Internet access by clicking on “Options” and then make sure “MIDlet Network Access” is checked.

The beauty of this emulator is that it’ll run most mobile browsers like Bolt or Opera Mini. As far as I know, Opera Mini is just about the easiest to install – all you have to do is download the JAD and JAR files at the Opera download page. Save them somewhere you’ll remember, preferably in the “devices” folder in the MicroEmulator application directory. Then, you can load up the Opera Mini browser inside the emulator by clicking on File and then “Open MIDlet File…”

You will see “Opera Mini” appear on the main screen under the list of devices. To launch the mobile browser, just select it and click “Start”. The Opera Mini browser will launch just like you’re running it on your own mobile device – along with the streamlined bandwidth that you’d be using if you were actually using your phone.

While this is pretty cool – it isn’t good enough. The whole point of using your computer or laptop is to take advantage of the large screen, right? Let’s resize the display window to a wider display. In MicroEmulator, you do this by clicking on Options and “Select Device…”

Select “Resizable device” and then click on “Add…“ You’ll see a list of devices to choose from. Click the mobile browser you’ve installed, and then type in the size of the window that you would like.

Once you launch Opera Mini again, it’ll now be in a larger window with the size parameters you set. Make sure to go into the Opera Mini browser settings and enable “Fullscreen” mode and enable “Load images” and set “Image quality” to medium for an optimal browsing experience. Just because you’re browsing over a mobile network with your laptop doesn’t mean you can enjoy it a little!

Now, when you launch any page that has a mobile version, you’ll notice that the site “senses” you’re using a WAP connection and will serve up the mobile version of the page – cutting down your overall bandwidth significantly. Here’s the main page of MUO displayed through this Opera Mini browser running on my laptop.

Clicking on one of the articles, the page loaded in just seconds, used only about 300 KB to fully load the page.

Loading it in a regular browser consumes over 1.5MB of bandwidth. You can imagine how the data consumption can pile up over time if you don’t use a mobile browser to take care of your Internet needs while you’re on the road.

I am not encouraging anyone to break the terms and rules of their contract, however there are a lot of people that specifically sign contracts that allow tethering, but usage is on a metered basis. The method described above will allow you the convenience of using the nice widescreen of your laptop, while maintaining a lower data usage that won’t break your bank account.

So, give the MicroEmulator with Opera Mini a try and see if it opens up your world to new, mobile possibilities. Do you find that using a mobile browser is too limiting? Are there other mobile browsers that work well with MicroEmulator? Share your own experiences in the comments section below.

Keep track of your connection speed and usage with iTraffic

Varun Kashyap — Wed, 20 May 2009 21:00:05 +0000

These days there are plenty of plans to choose from to get yourself on the Internet. Some offer various speeds, others impose a bandwidth cap, so on and so forth. Understandably, it is essential to monitor your connection to ensure you are getting the stipulated bandwidth and also keep a track of your usage statistics. This can be done easily with a simple, yet powerful tool – iTraffic.

iTraffic is a network monitoring and reporting tool. It lets you monitor your connection in real-time, providing you with plenty of information about your network connection. You can download and install iTraffic from here.

Once you install and run it, you are required to choose a network card that you would like iTraffic to keep an eye on. Once that is done, you will instantly see results in the form of a real-time graph, representing the current upload and download speeds. The monitoring and graphing options are fully customizable. You may visit settings panel via the tray icon to choose a different network card, set up graphing preferences like colors and units, etc.

iTraffic uses WinPcap for filtering network traffic so you can easily specify IP addresses to be ignored by iTraffic. Besides this, you can also tweak some general settings like starting automatically with Windows, tray icon and tooltips.

If you are looking for a precise speed rating, use the bandwidth stopwatch (right click on the graph). It allows you to measure upload and download speeds for a specific interval and shows you the results. Make sure you select a good server to upload to/download from for an accurate assessment.

A neat little trick that is worth pointing out is that you can double-click on the graph (or hit F8) and you will see the title bar and taskbar icon vanish, and boom you have got yourself a network monitoring widget. You can also right click on the graph and choose additional information that you would like to see.

iTraffic will also allow you to view past figures so that you can track what your network usage. I find it especially useful with the fairly stringent bandwidth caps here in India. You can easily keep track of your usage with the help of an overview report or you can dig deeper and analyze your weekly, monthly or yearly usages.

Screenshot Credit

One potential drawback (can’t really blame the application) is that for people like me who frequently work in different operating systems you tend to loose track of the total usage. Maybe there is a similar tool that works across operating systems? Let me know via comments if you know of one. Nevertheless, if you would like to keep an eye on your connection on a single computer, iTraffic is highly recommended.

Ever Wanted To Measure Your Bandwidth Usage? (Windows)

Karl L. Gechlik — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 14:30:27 +0000

It doesn’t matter if you are looking to find out about how much bandwidth you are using to determine if your ISP is charging you fairly, if your net connection is a bottleneck or simply because you are like me and love statistics.

Well we can use this simple bandwidth monitoring tool called Networx. If you are paying for your internet per KB or MB than you can use this application to measure bandwidth usage and shut down your network when you reach a certain level.

So in addition to all the pretty graphs and charts we also get better control over our connection. You can use Networx to see how fast your connection actually is or see how much bandwidth your kids are using downloading MP3′s.

Networx has a installer and a portable edition. I used the portable 767kb file and ran it.

You will see a system tray icon appear like the one in the above picture. You can hover over the icon to get quick statistics also like you see in the picture.

Upon right clicking the icon you will get this context menu:

All of the options are pretty self explanatory but we will run through them anyway. By clicking on the first item Show Graph you will get a screen that looks like this:

That graph will keep updating and is very accurate. The only options it has is ““ open or closed

Next is the Speed Meter:

Go ahead and hit the Start button and let it calculate all your downloads and uploads ““ it will then calculate how much data is traveling through your system currently. You can start, stop, reset counters, copy .to clipboard or save to file. The incrementing numbers is simply a stop watch so you can see how long you have been collecting data for.

Next up is the usage statistics:

You can get detailed information for daily, weekly or monthly statistics. You can set up your own custom reports as well as set hourly rates. And for those of you still using dial up ““ it has some stats for you as well.

The Quota tab looks like this:

Using this tab you can have Networx alert you when you have used a certain amount of data.

Next up is our settings:

The last three options are graphical network tools. They are NetStat, Ping and Trace Route. Netstat will tell you what is connected to your machine:

Ping allows you to test connectivity over the network or Internet:

and Trace Route lets you “Trace” your network route step by step to see where it is failing (or that it is succeeding):

Do you have another way for keeping track of your bandwidth? Do you have other favorite network tool to measure bandwidth usage? If you do be nice, c’mon share them with the others”¦

Check If Your ISP Throttling Your BitTorrent Downloads

Karl L. Gechlik — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:00:47 +0000

So the cat’s been out of the bag for a while now that ISP’s are throttling or in some cases even blocking your BitTorrent downloads or seeding.

Comcast came out and admitted to it’s practices in the United States last year. You can read about it here on wired. Since then there has been lot’s of speculation on if other ISP’s are doing the same thing”¦

What do you think?

Yeah we do also!

Now there is a free tool that will simulate BitTorrent activities and let you know if your speed or activities have been effected and to what extent. This program (aka bittorrent throttling test) and group have picked up momentum since 2008 and now have the backing of Google and other big names.

Are you curious as to if your ISP is throttling your torrent downloads and doing you dirty?

Well so are we.

Run the tool below on any web browser on any operating system and post back what your results are in the comments. It is strictly web based and nothing gets installed. So you can try it pretty much anywhere.

I tried this in the office on my Cogent circuit. It is a 100mb Ethernet handoff so I was not really expecting any throttling. All you need to run the test is browse on over to:

a title=”http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest.php” href=”http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest.php”>http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest.php.

You will be greeted by a web page that looks like this:

Simply scroll down on the page until you see the Start Testing button. You can run the detailed or the simple test. The only difference is the intensity of the test. Some ISP’s are believed to only throttle torrents after a certain period of time (greater than 5 minutes) so this will have you covered.

After you hit the Start testing button your test will begin and you will see a count down in a window that looks something like what you see below.

When the test is complete you will get your results. They will also look something like mine which you can see below. My ISP is NOT throttling my BT downloads or seeding activity and they go into detail on each point they checked as well as the speeds they were able to achieve with the transfers.

I love geeky statistics. Here are my results:

I had a buddy of mine run this against his machine on Comcast in Manhattan and his results came through with Throttling and max speeds of only 25kbps”¦ Whoa that’s slow! Thanks for the tip El Di Pablo!

Post your results in the comments. And if you have another method of testing if your ISP is getting it’s grubby hands on your torrents post that as well. Don’t be shy kids

How To Cheat With Your BitTorrent Ratio

Simon Slangen — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 17:01:33 +0000

There are many great advantages to using private torrent trackers. For instance, the reliability and speed of the downloads exceeds those of free trackers, mainly because of the ratio systems. These ratio systems oblige everyone to upload about at least as much as they download.

Ironically, the biggest disadvantages lie also with the ratio system. Don’t get me wrong, I think everyone should upload as much as they can, but sometimes your ratio obligations can put you in some pretty nasty situations.

I remember looking for a certain private tracker invite for a few months. When I finally got in, I tried to get my ratio up as high as possible – stacking up reserves. But however hard I tried, I wasn’t able to reach an approachably decent ratio. There were just too many seeds and too few leeches.

I had my computer running day and night, trying to upload as much as I could, but in the end I wasn’t even able to reseed my first download and I got nicked.

Cheat With Your Torrent Ratio

Some time ago, I found out that there were ways to manipulate your ratio. However, the consequences are not to be excluded.

(LEGAL) DISCLAIMER

Before we go on, I want to emphasize that everyone with a decent mindset should upload as much as possible. Don’t be the parasite on the backs of this unconditional medium, try to support it as much as possible.

Also – obviously – torrent trackers don’t like you doing this, and if they find out you’ll probably get banned. MakeUseOf will not be held liable in this matter – all blame for your actions lies with yourself.

Through the use of applications, we can spoof our upload count, and hereby alter our Torrent Ratio. There are several applications that can do this, all working in the same way. They fake the tracker update reporting protocol with fake data, to boost your ‘upload’.

Tracker Pro

Tracker Pro is one of these applications, and very easy to use.

To spoof your upload count, just add a torrent to the program. One of the great features that distinguishes this application from others is that you don’t even have to download the torrent to start “uploading”.

Tips For Staying Undetected

Like I mentioned in the disclaimer, if trackers notice that you’re spoofing your upload, you’ll most likely get banned. To prevent this, you need to lay low.

Limit your usage

Don’t use this application excessively. People will notice it if you suddenly become a master uploader – try using it only if you must.

Limit your upload bandwidth

You can limit the false upload speeds in the options. The lower you keep this, the harder it’ll be to get noticed. Note that this number is in Kbits (8 Kbits = 1 KByte).

Also, change this number as often as possible. Trackers use scripts to detect cheaters. By keeping your speeds low, and ruining your pattern, you can mislead these scripts.

Changing your User Agent

This is for the paranoid people amongst us.

Also in the options, you can also define which program you’re using, by changing the User Agent code and Client ID, although I’d advise you to refrain from this if you don’t know what you’re doing – messing up these codes will be like lighting a beacon.

You can search for these codes on User-Agents or plain ol’ Google.

Do you personally have any other tricks for getting one up on BitTorrent or any other file sharing network?

Increase the Speed of Your Internet Connection

Tina Sieber — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:09:37 +0000

Does your ISP deliver the speed you pay for? It’s rather easy to test your broadband internet speed. However, there are a few things to keep in mind. For one, ISPs usually promise an “up to” speed, so you can’t expect top performance at all times, that’s part of the deal. During high traffic times your ISP will suffer from high loads and will certainly not be able to deliver the maximum speed. Thus you’d best perform different speed tests at different time points, to see whether you ever reach the top speed. Also, when running a speed test, make sure no other applications are using the internet, else the result will not be accurate.

Speedtest.net is a good place to test your internet speed. They operate through servers all over the world, so you can connect to a server near you, which increases the accuracy of your result.

As you may realize, your internet speed does not only depend on your ISP, it also depends on the hardware and software used on your end of the line. If you are using hardware provided by your ISP, there shouldn’t be a problem. The bottleneck for speed often sits in the connecting computer.

Here are a few tips to Increase the Speed of Your Internet Connection

(1) Connecting Port

This may seem obvious, but you should connect to the internet though an ethernet port, rather than a serial, parallel or USB port. If ethernet is not an option, it may be advisable to update your hardware.

(2) Enough RAM

Make sure your system memory can handle the load! If you want to browse fast, you will need to close other applications in case your RAM is maxed out.

(3) Fast Browser

Mozilla based browsers generally are among the fastest browsers, while still being comfortable to use. Whichever open source browser you pick, make sure you don’t overload it with extensions or addons, those will just slow your browser down dramatically. On the other hand, if speed and RAM are not an issue, go for the luxury!

Also there are a number of tweaks and addons to increase the speed of your browser.

(4) Increase Speed under Windows XP Pro

Windows XP Professional reserves 20% of your bandwidth for services like updates or spyware checks. If you would like to exploit this reserve, do the following:

1. Click [Windows] + [R] and type gpedit.msc in the Run window.
2. Under Computer Configuration expand the Administrative Templates.
3. Go to Network and click the QoS Packet Scheduler tab.
4. Double-click on Limit Reservable Bandwidth and enable it.
5. Finally change the Bandwidth limit to 0% and click Apply.
6. Reboot your computer and enjoy.

(5) Tweak Tools

There are a number of programs that promise to increase your internet speed. They may work, they may not. They all apply a number of changes to optimize your network settings. Whether or not they will really improve your internet speed or which one will work the best for you greatly depends on your system, hence it’s difficult to recommend an application.

For further reading I will refer you to a set of articles found on About.com. Start with DSL and Cable Broadband Speed Tweaks and work your way through the links at the bottom.

Which tools and tweaks worked best for you?

(By) This post was written by one of our regular authors, Tina from Recommended.

How to Save and Monitor Bandwidth when using Firefox

Shankar Ganesh — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 03:55:16 +0000

These days, though internet connection speeds have advanced, there are people out there who are using limited connection that come with a monthly bandwidth cap. In such cases when the user goes over the limit for that time period, he is usually surprised with a hefty bill at the end of the month. If your monthly bandwidth is limited here are some tools to help you reduce and monitor your bandwidth consumption.

Block Images

Go to the Tools >> Options dialog in Firefox. In the content tab, uncheck ‘Load Images Automatically’. By clicking on the exceptions button, you could add a few sites which can be allowed to display images. This way, you can set Firefox to download images from only a handful of sites. That means less bandwidth consumed, since every other page on the internet contains pictures. You’ll lose the full glory of a webpage, though.

Similarly you can also use the additional options present in the dialog to block Java Scripts and Java elements.

Block Obtrusive and Bandwidth Consuming ads using Adblock Plus

Adblock Plus is a neat addon for Firefox that blocks banner ads and images that consume your bandwidth hugely. Once installed, you can use the settings to add filters and block advertisements on webpages. Wildcards and regular expressions supported.

Right click, and set an image/ad to be blocked, it’ll never appear again. Otherwise, use the icon in the toolbar to view the page’s multimedia elements along with the networks that serve them, and block them.

Block Javascript, Java and other Special Executable Content from running with Noscript

NoScript blocks all scripts (ex. animations) in sites, and allows only a few trusted sites to run such applets on your browser.

Besides saving tons of bandwidth, you’ll also get improved security because only these executable elements do harmful things to your computer, most of the time.

Cap Download/Upload rates and monitor your bandwidth consumption

Firefox Throttle is a very interesting addon for Firefox that lets you limit the upload and download rates (throttling) for Firefox – this will affect not just the speed of your downloads, but also the loading time of web pages. Basically, by using Firefox Throttle you are able to reduce the speed of your connection.

You can also exclude websites from being ‘throttled’. There’s a little button to immediately turn on/off throttling. The Options dialog has a Stats tab that displays the amount of bandwidth consumed – how much data has been uploaded and downloaded. Quite useful if you’re sharing an internet connection across multiple computers.

Another addon worth a mention here is Bandwidth Meter and Diagnostics. Although it doesn’t monitor your bandwidth, it lets you test download/upload speeds.

(By) Shankar Ganesh, a 16 year old Blogger and Freelance Writer from India. He blogs about Computers and Software at Killer Tech Tips