Speeding Up Your Connections to Websites

The speed of your connection to a Website is based on several factors, including:

Factors You Can Control	Factors You Cannot Control
1. Time of day 2. Speed of your connection 3. Quality of phone lines--if on a modem, the phone company may be able to help 3. Size of your browser's cache 4. Browser Security and Privacy Settings 5. Utilities installed on your system that may be contributing to slowdowns	1. Robustness of the Web server serving up the page(s) 2. Number, size, and type of graphics at the site you are trying to access

Although there is little you can do at the moment about issues 1 through 4 above, you do have some control over how issue number 5 will affect your access to the site by turning off the setting in your browser that automatically loads and displays all graphics on a Webpage. Doing this will generally speed up your connection to the site considerably. After you are there, you can then turn on each graphic individually or turn them all back on if you decide the site is worth a closer look.

To turn off the browser feature that automatically loads and displays all images and other multimedia objects:

Internet Explorer	Firefox
1. Click TOOLS - INTERNET OPTIONS. 2. Click Advanced tab at top of Internet Options dialog box. 3. Scroll down to Multimedia category. 4. Remove check marks by all "Play..." and "Show..." options. 5. Reverse the process when you want to turn this feature back on.	1. Click TOOLS - OPTIONS. 2. Click Web Features. 3. Scroll down to Multimedia category. 4. Remove check mark by "Load Images" 5. Reverse the process when you want to turn this feature back on.

Another trick that works well if you haven't turned off the auto-load feature is to press the STOP icon or the ESC key to tell the browser to stop loading a particular page that appears to be bogged down while loading graphics. Since the text usually loads first, you will still be able to read and navigate around the Webpage. If you want to see missing graphics, you can click on each one separately to load it or click RELOAD or REFRESH to request the page again.

Misc. Notes About Speeding Up your Access to the Internet

- Avoid Web accelerator utilities such as NetSonic, BoostWeb, and many others. Although they work fine on many systems, they can cause major conflicts on others.

- Change to cable or DSL.

- Don't clear out your browser's cache or temp files which help speed up the loading of Webpages you visit repeatedly.

- Add more RAM.

- Get a faster computer or upgrade your present one if it's possible and cost effective.

- You can check the speed of your Internet connection at http://webservices.cnet.com/bandwidth/