Speed Up Internet Connection

Mostly people expect a fast response when they browse the internet, but it doesn’t always run as mostly people expect. Typically there are many factors that contribute a slow internet connection such as: a bad line from the customer premises to the nearest central office of the service provider, Central office problems, buggy software, and mostly due to the Web farm servers you browse to at the other end of the connection. So how do you speed up internet connection? See also basic internet connection share.

Generally when you sign-up the internet connection there should be such kind of a service level agreement at least we know the bandwidth rate they provide the services to the subscriber. If you use traditional dial-up connection the maximum bandwidth will be 56Kbps. You cannot speed up internet connection exceeding the architecture limitation. DOCSIS 3.0 Cable architecture probably can provide you faster speed up to 300 Mbps – but depends on the infrastructure the ISPs have built. See also example of Cable modem router.

Definitely it is beyond our control when the bottom lines of the problems come from the ISP, the central office equipment, and slow web servers. But basically you can tweak the computers to get them in high performance in browsing the internet. The following guidelines will help you manipulate the computers to speed up internet connection.

How to tweak DNS setting to speed up internet connection

When you type in the hostnames in the browser such as www.sysneta.com, the DNS resolver needs to translate it into the corresponding IP address such as 65.125.102.113. DNS servers provide that name resolution automatically and behind the scenes as you surf the Web. See more detail about DNS definition here.

Simple Internet Connection Diagram

As show in the following internet connection diagram (assuming you use broadband internet connection with gateway router in home), a user in the computer’s browser types the URL for example Sysneta.com (which the IP address is 65.102.10.211), Windows will first lookup the entry in the HOSTS file to see if there’s an entry for the hostname, and, if it finds it, it will resolve the address itself. But if no entry in the HOSTS file, Windows will lookup the entry in the DNS local caching. If no entry, then the computer cannot resolve the address itself – it will send the query to the DNS server (as configured in the property of the TCP/IP setting). The DNS server will then return the answer to the computer with the IP address of Sysneta.com. The computer then connects to the server (Sysneta.com) with the IP address (65.102.10.211).

Editing Host File

A very simple way to speed up internet connection regarding the DNS setting is by editing the computer local hosts file. To have a better understanding how the DNS works, see also DNS forwarding. It takes time to send your request to a DNS server, have the server look up the proper IP address to resolve the name, and then send the IP address back to your PC. You can eliminate that delay by creating or editing a local HOSTS file on your own PC that contains hostnames and their corresponding IP addresses.

Windows will first lookup the entry in the HOSTS file to see if there’s an entry for the hostname, and, if it finds it, it will resolve the address itself. That way, you won’t have to go out to a DNS server and wait for the response before visiting a web site. You can edit the HOSTS file with the notepad and you can create lists of most frequent web sites you visit.

You’ll find an existing HOSTS file in C:\System32\Drivers\Etc\HOSTS. Open it in Notepad and enter the IP addresses and hostnames of your commonly visited web sites, like this:

Each entry in the file should be on one line. The IP address should be in the first column and the corresponding hostname in the next column. At least one space should separate the two columns. You can add comments to the file by preceding the line with a hash (#),

Adjust the Computer DNS Caching Settings

You can also adjust the DNS Caching setting to help speed up internet connection. When you visit a site, Windows puts the DNS information into a local DNS cache on the computers. When you browse a website, your Computer first looks in its local DNS cache, called the resolve cache, to see whether the DNS information is already in there. If it finds the information locally, it doesn’t have to query a remote DNS server to find IP information. The cache is made up of recently queried names and entries taken from your HOSTS file.

The cache contains both negative and positive entries that we can hack to help speed up internet connection. Positive entries are those in which the DNS lookup succeeded, and you were able to connect to the web site. When XP looks in the cache, if it finds a positive entry, it immediately uses that DNS information and sends you to the requested web site.

Negative entries are those in which no match was found, and you end up getting a “Cannot find server or DNS Error” in your browser. Similarly, when the computer looks in the cache and finds a negative entry, it gives you the error message without bothering to go out to the site.

Negative entries can lead to problems. When you try to make a connection to a site that has a negative entry in your cache, you’ll get an error message, even if the site’s problems have been resolved and it’s now reachable.

You can solve this problem to speed up internet connection using a Registry hack. By default, XP caches negative entries for five minutes. After five minutes, they’re cleared from your cache. But if you’d like, you can force XP not to cache these negative entries, so that you’ll never run into this problem.

Edit the registry using registry editor (Regedit from the Run command) and go to:

Create a new DWORD value with the name NegativeCacheTime and give it a value of 0. (The value may already exist. If it does, edit its value to 0.) The DWORD determines how much time, in seconds, to keep negative entries in the DNS cache. If you like, you can have the entries stay alive for one second by giving it a value of 1.

After you’re done editing, exit the Registry. To make the change take effect, restart your computer, or flush your cache by issuing the command ipconfig /flushdns at a command prompt.

That command will flush your DNS cache – all the entries, both positive and negative, will be flushed, and it will be empty until you start visiting web sites. Negative entries, however, will not be added to the cache if you’ve given the DWORD a value of 0.

To help you speed up internet connection you can also reduce the Web Cache as small as possible. The less disk space in your computer Web Cache for internet temporary files is less data the computer needs to search through. How to do that?

From your Windows, do the following:

Click Start => Select Control Panel => double click Internet Options => and then click Settings under Browsing History. Reduce the Disk Space to Use to the minimum amount the system recommend or as low as you want.

Clear Internet Temporary Files

Another good way to speed up internet connection is to clear your internet temporary files. Many files in the web cache are active such as cookies are loaded in the browsers and constantly update themselves when you are surfing the internet. The computers always search the temporary files to match the latest version of a web page. To speed up internet connection you can clear the web cache to cut down the works the computer needs to do.

The following steps can be tried to delete the web cache, make sure to shutdown the browsers prior performing the steps.

Click Start => Click Control Panel => double click Internet Options => Click Delete Files under Temporary Internet Files on the General tab. => check the Delete all offline content box and then click OK.

Spyware and viruses

Spyware and any types of Internet threats can cause the computers to slow down the internet response. To speed up the internet connection, you need to make sure your computers are free from any types of malware and spyware. Malware (Malicious software) is designed to infiltrate a computer without the owner’s informed consent which has the terms to mean a variety of forms of hostile, intrusive, or annoying software or program code. Spyware is actively collect the users information such as Credit card number, the passwords etc.

Some Trojan viruses can also causes slow internet connection; scan the virus regularly to help you speed up internet connection. Make sure the computers are well protected by the antivirus software such as McAfee, or Bitdefender internet security 2010.

Suggested readings:

• The Best wireless routers
• An example of risk assessment
• Disaster recovery planning
• Windows Internet Security
• Internet security tools