There are several factors in downloading speed.
1. It the website itself is overloaded, you can't do anything to change that. The following factors apply:
- The number of uses downloading from that website at any one time.
- The speed of the connections that website has. This is especially important if the website is on a home or business PC somewhere, instead of on a huge server cluster or mainframe.
- Whether or not the website has faster drives for some pages and slower drives for others.
- Whether or not the website gives priority to certain kinds of files (such as text or pay files).
- Whether or not ads displaying on the web page are slowing everything down.
- Whether or not an operator must give manual permission for a download to occur.
2. If your own ISP is overloaded, you can't do anything except change ISPs. The following factors apply:
- The speed of your own ISP.
- The number and activity of users currently using your ISP.
- Whether or not your ISP is filtering your download to stop malicious software.
- Whether or not your ISP gives priority to certain file types, users, or services.
- In the case of a cable modem, the total capacity of the cable running from the base station to your area. Other users on your branch can slow things down without slowing down the ISP.
- It could be that your ISP is validating your connection to the website at a lower speed, to avoid swamping itself with traffic.
3. Your connection can change speed. The only rememdy is to repalce the connection method. The following factors apply:
- With dial-up, you could end up with connections of different quality between your telephone and the ISP. This can change your highest transfer speed.
- Older telephone wiring in the house can slow down dial-up and DSL connections. So can older wiring from your house to the phone exchange. The weather can also affect older outdoor wiring.
- Certain DSL connections can be slowed down when somone is using the telephone, especially if a filter is missing, or too many ringers are attached to the line.
- Squirrels can damage outdoor wiring, causing crosstalk and slowdowns.
- The speed of WiFi and cell phone systems depend on the total amount of traffic using the base station or cell tower.
4. Finally , look at your computer. The following factors apply:
- The number of windows you have open. Each one gets a timeslice, as does Windows.
- Whether or not you have other processes doing something, such as printing or timed events.
- Your firewall, and virus and spyware checkers. But I would not disable this.
- Look for malware too.
- Clean out your system tray. Every little icon in the right corner of your status bar is soaking up time. I have only three icons there: Malware detector, DSL system, and print driver/controller.
- If downloaded images have to be converted to a different screen color resolution (especially a lower one), it slows downloading dramatically. Movies have this problem too, on a brobdingnagian scale.
- Is your hard disk nearly full. This causes a slowdowm, as does a fragmented disk.
- Do you have enough Internet cache reserved? If not, the browser has to play memory manager in addition to downloading the file.
- A data-compressed disk drive will slow down everything.
- Older computers have slower CPU and disk speeds. Sofdtware intended to speed this up does not work.
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How to find out which factors are affecting you:
- Try other websites, and see if they are faster. If they are, the speed limiting factor is certainly at the website you are trying to download from. Your computer system and ISP are as fast as or faster than the fastest download you find on the entire internet.
- Does the image appear in low resolution first, then improve its resolution at a slower rate? If so, the website owner KNOWS his connection is slow.
- If you see "waiting for (website name)" in the browser activity window, you know you are waiting on other traffic at the website's computer. The site is overloaded. Try using that site at off-peak times. But if it happens at 3 in the morning, it means the site is backing up its files then.
- If you see doubleclick.net in your browser activity window when you go to the slow site, you need look no farther. This is an ad company which ioversubscribes its capacity. It taskes a long time for it to connect.
- If your download speed varies with the time of day on some websites, but not others, the websites with the varying time are swamped with download traffic.
- If your ISP has files on it, download some of them. If they are faster than downloads on all remote sites, the ISP's connection to the internet is the limiting factor.
- Try dialing up from a different location or telephone exchange. If it is faster, suspect the quality of the wiring.
- If you have dial-up or DSL, unplug the telephones and try it. If the speed goes up, those phones may be nonstandard or damaged. Reconnect them one by one, to see which phones are causing the trouble. If the last phone slows thing down, no matter which one it is, then you have too many phones. Rethink your phone use, or get a dedicated line for the computer.
- Try using the Internet late at night. If it is faster, you are competing with other traffic, not an absolute limit.
- Borrow a faster computer and see if it helps. If it does not, then you have no control over your download speed.