When looking at slow broadband connection issues you can contact your ISP to find out if the connection is okay and then start looking at software changes on your system that may be required to help improve performance. Here I’ll show you some of these PC maintenance techniques to troubleshoot applications running on your system.

It is essential to start out by assessing the current speed of the system. The easiest way to do this is to open a browser and go to speedtest.net to establish the current download, upload and ping rates.

Next, you can start to make some changes. Begin with disabling as many of your browser add-ons as possible as these can use up a lot of your Internet bandwidth. Remove them entirely if you don’t feel you need them.

The browser itself may need to be updated. Patch updates usually include security fixes but will also include performance improvements to the code base. Configuration changes can subsequently be made to the browser itself using tools like Faster Fox.

You should also consider testing out different browsers. IE and Firefox render video content and cutting edge web technologies quite differently so tend to these operations in different ways.

The major cause of contingency on your system may well be services running in the background that are accessing the web. These can be blocked through using your firewall permissions. The one thing to be careful about is that you do not block Windows update or any of your critical security applications from web access.

Don’t forget also that a slow broadband connection may be experienced when you find your laptop running slow in general. Overall performance issues can also impact the browser, modem and overall connectivity. Some of the things to try to improve overall performance include scanning for viruses, increasing the page file size and defragmenting the hard drive.

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