Wall of Mouths

I’m not the best with pc’s/laptops either, i’m also with sky and it sometimes does go a bit slow, youtube today has barely worked for me. It could be something to do with how much you’ve been downloading, well for me anyway i’ve downloaded quite alot of videos over the last week. What internet protection thingy do you use, that’s how I see my interet connection using mcafee.

As for wireless, mcafee won’t even let me go wireless. They apparently make it very hard to use it, defeating the object of me buying a laptop. Luckily it runs out next month. I should really just remove it from my pc anyway, but usually when I do stuff like that things start to go wrong. :D

I think theres a fair few wombles in the know about pc problems. I’ve asked for help a few times before and had my problems solved.

Maybe worth a full system scan , see if it picks up and unwanted nastys. :)

Strange, everyone I know who has virgin never have anything good to say about it ever, they really hate it. Suppose it’s certain areas though, I can’t even get virgin, so I guess the people who have it near me are getting the shit end of it or something.

As for sky it’s pretty reliable, I just can’t seem to get wireless to work, i’ve even uninstalled mcafee and I still can’t get it. It says that the settings i’ve put in are not the same as my skWish router. :S

Wish the prices would go down with sky aswell, my current monthly bill is about £63 all together with internet, phone and t.v and I wanted to add setanta aswell, think i’ll give that a miss.

Gav’s like our PC World tech guy ;)

:D

Yeah - basically the more people that connect to your telephone exchange the lower connection speed you will get. It might be worth checking how far you are away from your telephone exchange… http://www.samknows.com/broadband/search.php

The closer to your exchange you are the better chance you have of getting good speeds - If you are within 1 km of your exchange and you are getting shitty speeds I’d say you have good grounds for complaining to sky.

http://dslzoneuk.net/ has some good info on their site - they have a speed test (although i wouldn’t read too much into the online speed checkers). But there are some good tips for checking the wiring inside your telephone socket… well worth doing.

There is another potential problem with the amount of other wireless router users close to you - is if they are using the same wireless channel as you it can bugger up your connection - but the symptoms of that are usually your wireless connection to your router keeps dropping and reconnecting rather than what yours sounds like (i.e. your connection to your router is fine / uniterupted - but your connection to the ISP is slow)

Just checked the phone exchange, its pretty close. But you see we do have a problem with the connection dropping as well. The bigger problem is the speed, but the connection does drop occassionally.

Ultimately it sounds like congestion then?

Do you know how to connect to your router and access the setup pages?

They should look like a web page - what router do you have? did sky provide it?

I’d look for a setting on the router to back up your current config setting (always worthwhile)… and make sure you have an ethernet cable so you can wire it directly to your pc incase you fuck up the wireless settings and cant connect back in.

Under the wireless setup - there should be a wireless channel number - make sure it is set to automatic - if the problem with dropping persists, try manually setting it to a different channel (should be 1 to 11) - that shouldn’t affect the speed of your connection though.

My router’s a netgear router, which hooked up without a problem!

Wasn’t supplied to me by Sky though, £40 in Curry’s - well priced - hooked up my bro’s laptop, my own laptop, xbox 360, ps3 and at times my old mobile phone fed off it’s wireless.

I highly recommend Netgear

Have you tried power cycling the router? Do you have a filter attached to all the telephones in your property? Have you tried attaching the router to another telephone socket if there is one?

I very much doubt you’ll see anything noticeably wrong by connecting to the router itself, sounds like a synchronisation issue - if you reboot the router you’ll force a re-sync between the router and the exchange. ADSL suffers badly from a bottle neck with bandwidth at the exchange, I notice my broadband gets a lot slower around half term school holidays as all those lazy bastard kids are on xbox live sucking bandwidth.

The cabling to your property from the exchange will have a big factor on bandwidth as well, but as you’ve said it’s been getting slower so I’d start by checking the things I mentioned above.

What kind of bandwidth are you getting?

http://www.speedtest.bbmax.co.uk/

on the issue of ‘choking’ my households average use is 100 gb per month and we’re on bt, the speeds do slow down in the evening but nowhere near as bad as plusnet who’d lower us to a 128 kbps connection that ended up downloading at 12kbps all day once we hit 40gb of peak time usage in a month. in fact the bt connection is fine its enough for normal useage in the evening and heavy downloading early and late morning plus afternoon which is fine with me

well im on the highest package you can get if your exchange isnt unbundled, it is advertised as unlimited, but there is a fair usage claused buried in the terms, only crap thing is they dont explain the actual limit or formula or anything, but its tolerable really.

I’d be on that if i diddnt live in an area that hasnt long had 8meg. hopefully my exchange will get unbundled soon, then again if i go to swansea uni the student accomedation has a virgin media line in each room for a charge each month