Internet Speed slow today?

[Dave A]

When are the new cables due to be hooked up for us sheeple?

Good question. I was hoping the mess around was due to the system being reconfigured to tap into the Seacom cable.

When are we going to get this blindingly fast international connectivity?

[tec0]

I think the Telkom’s hardware infrastructure may not be able to handle the speeds demanded. Secondly they are still expensive! The sad truth is there are places that still don’t have ADSL capabilities! I think they are too small to handle the demands and they don’t want proper competitors so we get crappy expensive lines.

[Dave A]

Vodacom 3G is down. Has been since yesterday morning and they've no idea when they'll be back up and running again. Sounds fairly serious.

EDIT: I just shot over to mybroadband.co.za to see what was going on in the Vodacom 3G forum. Very, very quiet in there. Obviously not everyone has an alternative means to connect.

[tec0]

Being with Virgin Mobile is like having an Enema done by Freddy Krueger!

[popayetwo]

Telkom ADSL was very slow today but seems better this evening. I was updating a local Joomla site and each page took two minutes to load iso just a few seconds.

At one point the connection dropped out.

[Dave A]

Well - got to the bottom of my V3G problem. AVG Firewall isn't recognising the ICMP and UDP protocol services all of a sudden. Solved by changing to the Windows firewall and disabling the AVG Firewall. Far too much trouble to try to set up the two services manually as safe on AVG.

[tec0]

I have been getting a lot of strange errors and computer crashes lately. You are not the first person with this problem Dave. I got two servers at a company both of them are running Server 2003. The one is a domain controller and the other a backup. Both of them hare having blue screens. The problems are Identical but the computers are not. The one is HP the other DELL both of them capable servers serving only ten computers.

The sinister black screen is still something I cannot track down on the systems I think it might be a VGA driver problem but even with SPs and updated drivers from Invidia the problem is still ongoing.

The client PC’s with windows Vista basic on all of them “Identical HP computers� are also starting to show this problem. I am now implementing a workshop solution downgrading to XP home with SP 2 and I took out all the Invidia cards and placed them back on their onboard VGA controllers. These computers are not gaming computers so the staff will not notice the GPU downgrade but I also found that simple programs like Microsoft Office and Pastel is suffering to run. These are not small computers they have 3 GHz CPU “upgraded� pure Intel with 4 GB ram each! In short they are little number crunching monsters! Running on a gigabit LAN.

3G is not having a firewall problem and I limited internet access to mail only. Mail rules are implemented no more “videos or mp3s� this is keeping the 3G stable but I never had so many runtime errors in my life before. I also took extra care with backup and I am running an isolated computer loaded with an antivirus just to make sure the backup is not infected with something.

The ADSL is unstable thus the VPN is shot to hell! 3G is coping and the internet access limits is helping but I am telling you now there is something I am not seeing Dave, it is scary. This was a stable network but with all the black screens and monitors that cannot wake-up once in sleep-mode is no longer an isolated case. Severs and client computers are showing symptoms!

A friend of mine in JHB told me he is having similar problems that stated shortly after he upgraded to Vista basic as clients OS with server 2003 as domain controller. 3G became unstable and more importantly he did a GPU upgrade to facilitate dual monitors using Invidia 9600 with updated drivers. The black-screens “now known between us as sleepy screens� followed after this upgrade.

So right now Vista Basic with SP1 looks like it is doing something with both 3G and ADSL! And Invidia is going to have a hell of a lot of returned hardware if they don’t wake up and address the sleepy screens!

[tec0]

Right, after setting up a workshop computer I found that there was spyware imbedded system32 folder. I got rid of it. Then I got to work with the invidia sleepy screen problem. Right now the tests are showing some promise. I disabled some of its functions within the Invidia driver itself basically I just set it up for performance and not quality.

Then I updated Vista home basic’s power preferences on the desktop computers. Basically I disabled sleep mode for the time being and made a shutdown shortcut on the desktop for the users to use thus avoiding sleep-mode.

Next I disabled a few unneeded services “just Google it�. Using System Configuration I disabled a few start-up processes and update processes. There were about 15 of them running on ALL the client computers thanks to software installations that were done without my knowing. “Typical�

Right now the sleepy screen appears to be a thing of the past but I will still run a 24 hour test on it. Secondly the runtime trouble is a thing of the past and my connections on both 3G and ADSL seems to be stable. I also lifted the spyware from the backup thus the backup is virus free and spyware free. So the XP home downgrade will not take place if the 24 hour tests are successful. Let us hope that it will be case.