next story Blogs_next_icon

Slow Internet Connection: A first Step

In my steps to diagnose a slow internet connection Task Manager is a very good first diagnostic tool. It isolates the problem about 80% of the time.

"The Internet is Slow" is a common complaint in our household of three PCs and an occasional visitor. I understand from the help desks of Comcast, Time Warner, and BellSouth that they always find this among the top complaints and often one they can do the least about so I though I'd give you a quick summary of the steps I take when it comes up.

The first issue is to recognize that "The Internet" and our local service provider (AT&T) have the traffic down to a pretty predictable science and having "The Internet" actually be slow is a relatively rare occurrence. Not saying it doesn't happen, just that the vast majority of the time it's actually one of our computers that has an issue.

My first reaction is always to bring up the Task Manager in Windows. Task Manager is a monitoring tool that Microsoft has included in the OS that allows you to see more detail about what is running on your computer. From that list you can usually take a good guess at what it is that is slowing you down.

To bring it up, you type Ctrl-Alt-Del and it either comes up (Win XP) or you choose "Task Manager" from a dialog window that appears (Win 2K). Up pops a window that shows the applications you're running, hopefully just a few. If you click on the Tab along the top that says "Processes" you'll get a much longer list of things running on your computer and this is what I use for the first step in my diagnostic. The list is sortable so I click on the "CPU" heading first to sort the list by load on the CPU of the computer. I usually have to click it twice to have it sort by Most CPU usage at the top. If you have Windows XP make sure you click on the button in the bottom left that says "Show Processes from all users" so you get a broad picture of what's going on.

If the computer is operating normally (that is, the Internet is working fine) I usually get a process called "System Idle Process" at the top. It's usually using somewhere in the high 90's of the CPU. If that is not the case the culprit in slowing down my computer is usually second or first on the list. At this point I've identified the problem. Before I just End the process (there's a button to do that) I usually do a search for it to understand the implication of getting rid of it. I'll look in Zolved or just Google the whole name of the process - make sure you include the ".exe" termination. Searching for acrord32.exe, for example, usually yields a top line result that lets me know it's related to the Adobe Acrobat Reader, usually loaded when I looked at some PDF document on the web. Since it's not critical to the operation of the computer I just go ahead and kill the process. That usually solves the problem.

But what if the CPU load was normal? Then I sort the list by "Mem Usage"; again click it enough to get the highest numbers at the top. Often I will see some process taking a huge amount of memory and slowing everything down. This happens frequently on our XP machine that we have set up for multiple users, where one user will leave an IE open to some web page that consumes a lot of memory. If it's that obvious, I'll usually just quit that application or End the process and problem solved.

Sometimes, however, it's not one process but a few (less than 10) that collectively are taking up a lot of memory. If it looks like that might be the case I click on the "Performance" Tab along the top and look at the Memory Usage section in the bottom. If the memory usage graph is showing significantly more memory than what I have in my machine (See illustration) I figure the computer is slow because it's moving information that should all be in memory, back and forth to the hard disk which slows everything down. Then I usually go back to Windows and start exiting applications until the memory graph drops to a more reasonable level (well below my Physical Memory installed). Sometimes that's not enough and I find I just have to reboot the computer to get to a reasonable level -- without getting into the technical reasons on why this happens, suffice it to say that if you leave your computer on for many days in a row, which we always do, eventually some application doesn't clean up after itself and leaves a bunch of garbage behind in memory and creates this problem. Fortunately almost always resolved by rebooting.

If all that didn't work than I'll go to some of the common PC cleanup such as this one, although I have now made it a habit of cleaning up the caches on my PC often. More on that in another post. Good luck getting back up to speed.