There are all kinds of things that can affect the speed of your internet access.

Firstly, it is worth checking what download speeds your ISP offers, as well as what speed you are getting in your local area.

You will also need to check the speed of your router, as this can affect your connection. A PING test is a computer network tool used to test whether a particular host is reachable across an IP network, and will show you how fast your router is. There are a number of websites that offer this service.

The equipment you are using could also be affecting your internet connection speeds and a computer engineer can test this for you. If you have an old machine you may need to defragment your computer, which is the process of reorganising files so they occupy less space on your hard disk.

Finally botnets and spyware could be affecting speed on your machine and slowing it down. A botnet acts as a relay that forwards spam to other machines. You may not be aware that you have been infected but if this is the case, you too will be forwarding on content. Spyware (a type of malicious software) monitors how a computer is used and sends reports to another computer via the internet, for example, logging credit card numbers or username and password entries to steal a person’s identity. This can also slow down your machine. Most security software and firewalls includes some sort of protection against known threats. However, in order to avoid these kinds of attack, you need to ensure that anything you download - whether from a Web site or in an email â“ is from a safe, secure, credible source.

BT offers a comprehensive Internet Security Pack that will protect from the type of malware that will cause this sort of PC slow running.

Copyright 2010 Vitesse Media

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