Improve Internet speed

So basically all the tweaks, tips, advice,etc. that you see on increasing broadband speed are really not valid? I guess thats why AT&T offers different broadband speed services.

Jimmy is right. All of those tweaks and tips might offer some tiny improvement, but the only way to get a significant boost is to pay for faster service from your ISP.

How does a list of old downloads have ANY impact at all on the rate at which you download new files? If that's an indication of the kind of tips this "Insider Secret" site or whatever is offering up, then they are completely full of it. That has got to be one of the single dumbest "tips" I have ever heard someone offer up. And while I get that you're just repeating what you heard, you might want to apply a slightly tougher litmus test to the things you believe from places like that. Remember that pretty much anyone with $200 or so to spend can throw up a very professional looking website in an afternoon. It doesn't mean the content contained in the site is worth anything. Look at Wikipedia for example. I know next to nothing about neuroscience, but I could certainly go and edit the Wikipedia page on neuroscience if I wanted to. Make all kinds of outrageous claims either pro or con, with absolutely nothing to back them up.

Tips for improving computer performance are like old folk remedies. There's hundreds of them out there, and the vast majority of them are completely and utterly useless. In fact, when you stop to think about them for even a second, they're so completely obvious you feel like smacking yourself for being so stupid as to believe it even for a moment. The idea that removing a list of previous downloads will somehow improve the speed of future downloads should be in that category.

And I'll say again... If this is a representative sample of the "tips" offered by this site or whatever Insider Secret is, then they have wrestled away the crown from the worst "tech" information source known to me. Given the former holder of this distinction is an unnamed company that has a red circular logo with a big white C inside it, that's quite the accomplishment. Not one to be proud of though. Find yourself another source for "tips". Or better yet, don't rely on tip sites, but read forums and mailing lists. Every now and then someone will inadvertently describe how they do something, and it will be a better method of how you perform the same task. Tip sites, as a general rule, don't have any actual tips, just useless and erroneous suggestions.

I run into machines with some tens of thousands of files in temp and downloads. Even XP can delay some seconds as the file is opened.

Keep it clean.
Bob

Just go to CNET TV and you will see Insider Secrets as one of the shows listed under CNET Tech Shows so if you think my advice is dumb, you're also talking about CNET's advice.

That cable Internet is a shared bandwidth system. Every so many blocks has a dedicated hub, and everyone connected to that hub shares some fixed amount of bandwidth. So depending on the number of people, and their usage patterns, cable Internet can be horribly slow. Plus, a lot of the major cable Internet companies have been overselling the capacity of their network. They may have enough bandwidth to server say 50,000 people, but they'll have no problem signing up 75,000-100,000 people, and then promoting all of this video on demand and VoIP stuff that sucks up even more bandwidth.

DSL is dedicated bandwidth. You buy X amount of service, and you're guaranteed that bandwidth no matter what your neighbors may be doing. They can be downloading all kinds of porn or pirated music/movie files, and it won't affect your Internet performance at all.

Firstly, posting into a thread that is now nearly a year old may not get you the help you need. Many members here just 'walk on by' when the see the date of the original post.

Secondly, since torrents and other P2P software are generally used to download copyrighted and pirated files and software, helping people who use torrents for such purposes contravenes Forum Policy. So unless you can convince members here that your downloaded files are genuinely free from copyright and are not pirated, and that you do not share files on your system that are similarly copyrighted or pirated, you may not get help for that reason.

Thirdly, I don't understand what a registry defrag has to do with internet connection speed. The registry in XP does not need constant defragmenting, and indeed, using registry optimisers can be dangerous. Deleting or amending the wrong key or value can leave your system unaccessible.

Finally, it is your internet connection speed that affects the speed with which you can download web sites or 'legal' files. In addition, if your ISP has many users connecting at the same time, you may see the bandwidth reduce to allow for the increased traffic. It's like a road. If there is no traffic, then you can travel fast. But if the road is busy your speed goes down.

Mark