Slow broadband speeds in Windblows? Kill icons and active desktop

[fury]

My dad's computer wasn't going very fast, in fact dialup was a bit faster, ping-time wise

So I killed most of the icons on the desktop (moved them into a folder on the desktop named "Desktop Icons"), and disabled Active Desktop, rebooted, and download speed boosted up to 200kb/s.

 

[Acid]

..that doesn't make sense.

 

[fury]

Windows doesn't make sense, Kyle. It just happened, trust me. A reboot alone didn't fix it, but killing the excess icons and active desktop, etc. then rebooting did.

 

[PostCode]

Have you try reapplying the active desktop and moving the icons back and trying this out again?

 

[fury]

Yes. The icons and active desktop combined definitely are the cause of the slow speed. I'm not sure which one is a bigger slowdown though. It doesn't really matter that much, besides, Active Desktop is useless, and if you have a lot of icons on the desktop, it's a good idea to clean it out anyway. I can't understand how anyone would want a desktop that messy.

 

[Acid]

Since when did <b>you</b> make computers work better.

This is a new concept for you

 

[fury]

 

[Gonzo]

You can't turn off active desktop in XP. It's either being used, when needed, or it's not.

 

[rrfield]

200 kbps seems pretty slow for a broadband connection. I *always* test at over 1mbps even at peak times, sometimes as high as 3mbps. And that's actuall transfer rates, taking overhead into consideration.

 

[fury]

200 kilobytes, not kilobits. For the sake of clarity, when I say kbps I mean kilobits and when I say kb/s I mean kilobytes.

The maximum rated speed for this connection is 3000 kbps (375kb/s), and that's often what I get on my computer. I imagine dad's computer is limited to 200kb/s due to the speed of the processor, because I added more memory to it and all that did was make it boot up 1 minute faster than before.

 

[rrfield]

ahh ok. I hardly ever see data rates represented in bytes. then again im not a big internet downloader or anything. and i usually see bytes represented with a capital B, bits with a lower case b. pretty nitpicky huh? in fact ever since i made a consious effort to work on PCs as little as possible, i forgot that bytes exist as a unit!

 

[fury]

yeah, but it's too hard to type kBps