Not a techie and need help

[hankm77]

Ok, cut me some slack here. Not too knowledgeable about software/hardware but need help. My computer has slowed down considerably within the past 5 days. Some sites load quickly, some load after a minute or so, and some don't load at all. And these are basic, cnn.com, abcnews.com sites. Also, was doing a little online shopping, and none of the thumbnails of the products showed up on the site.

I'm going crazy. And it's happening using both Firefox and IE. And yes, I downloaded the new version of Firefox last week, but it's happening with both browsers.

I'm using Vista home edition. And my hard drive is not full, in fact it's about 2/3 empty. It's a Dell Dimension, about a year old.

I have Mcafee and it's all updated. They aren't detecting anything. Should I try another virus protection? Maybe a free one?

Could it be my internet connection? I'm using a cable/broadband connection. What's the website where you check your internet speed? And what are the parameters I should be looking for?

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

Hank

 

[hankm77]

It seems to be just the internet. Although, honestly, I don't do much else with this desktop. Is Avast free? Or is the free edition at least decent? I don't mind buying something new, if it works. Would it be worth it to call the cable company to figure out if it's something on their end? Maybe they could check it?

 

[trawler69]

I don't know how you connect to the internet but when this happens to me 90% of the time it can be cured by restarting the modem / router. Deffo worth a try.

 

[Corny]

are just websites slow?
what download speed do you get?
what takes more time .. the site beginning to load or the loading of a website?

 

[hankm77]

Just got back from work, and thanks for all the help. I did the speedtest.net test and got a result of 15393 kbps for download and 2097 kbps for upload. Is that pretty decent?

I'm going to try the modem. Will turn it off and on. See if that helps.

Corny, it's a little of both. I've gone to abcnews.com and it just doesn't load. I get a blank white page. On the other hand, I'll go to datalounge.com, will get the page to load immediately, but will take a minute or 2 to get into the forum.

I'll let you know about the modem, and I'm going to check with the cable company too.

And jav1231, I'm going to try to look in my Task manager and see what's going on.

Thanks again for all the help

Hank

 

[D-Base]

Do you use utorrent? Same symptoms happen to me when utorrnet is on...

 

[hankm77]

Thanks for the heads up Trawler. The modem was the problem. I turned it off for about 1/2 hour and now everything seems to be working 100percent again.

Thanks for all the suggestions from everyone.

Hank

 

[Corny]

Do you use utorrent? Same symptoms happen to me when utorrnet is on...

i guess he had an ip someone was using for p2p prior to him seems like the router could not handle the amount of incoming connections .. just a wild guess

 

[trawler69]

Glad you got it sorted.

 

[hankm77]

Ok, now another question. Once or twice a week, i'll be cruising around on the internet, having 4 or 5 windows open. After an hour or so, my cursor will sort of start blinking, and become transparent. Then, the windows on the task bar will rearrange themselves, and my computer sort of crashes. I have to reboot, and do it a couple of times to get back to normal. Any ideas what this might be?