What do you do when Internet slows to a crawl?

Usually when my internet connection slows down, I will power down my modem, than refresh it. It always seems to get my speed back up to normal. While waiting I will usually work on some form of writing whether it be for on an article I want to publish, a poem or another discussion to post here on Mylot. When Mylot is down for maintenance I will go through my e-mail and see if I have any notifications in there that I can work out a response for my friends discussions. If not than I will go play one of the many online games at pogo or just surf around the net, unless boredom strikes than I will go watch something on television.

thanks for spelling out my dilemma, lordwiz... I was a little down a while back when after writing down a response and about to post it, the notification that mylot is down just showed up.. *sigh* I tried after a couple of minutes but then it wasn't working still. Well, I just went to to grab some snacks and stretch a bit. And am glad when I came back it was up already. And thanks too coz this doesn't happen that often. well, what I hate the most is when my computer slows down when it does some updates like for the antivirus.. it really is annoying to wait for hour for a page to load.. *sigh* by then, I got to find myself anything to do while waiting for the update to finish..could be going out a bit and take a fresh air, or do some stretching, grab a bite or a drink, or have some chit-chats with the people around. :P

I wonder around the home feeling a bit lost, to be honest. I do a few chores, Shreks paperwork, the garden, pets things etc. It's strange when I have to do things it doesn't bother me but when my AOL has me onn mouse arrest or mylot is poorly then I feel lost, I wonder does it feel that way when I go away, lol.

I doubt that you will ever be alone when it comes to your computer slowing to a crawl.Mine does that often.I do not have high speed internet where I live,I have dial up,and it constantly messes me up..I will get high speed just as soon as it is available in my area....I get very upset,sometimes I feel like taking a hammer to mine,but then what would I do about Mylot? So i endure this stupid slow thing..the highest I can get here is 36mb,and that is on a good day,so you see you are probably better off than I am..

this is a good topic wizard:) i know that when this happens it drives me crazy i could never cope well with this thing..slow internet and after you have a fast connection and suddenly everything goes slow on you..that is bad! i know that it is problematic enough that there are websites that are more heavy then others and because of that they are slow..i think that this too could be solved easily if you are aware of that..and they should do somthing about that..do not understans why they are not doing anything..they do lose clients because of that. but i also know that you do have to check why your internet connection is suddenly so slow..if it is really your supplier or is it due to problems in your computer..that is also a possibility.

when Mylot is loading slowly, and I cannot access Mylot, I go to Pogo.com to play games, Myspace to catch up on my sister & cousin. Check my regular emails, update my Queue at Netflix. If the internet is down altoghether, I normally watch TV or if at work, I do Sudoku or read a book. I hate when Mylot is down, and I am trying to reach my at least 20 post per day goal. I like to at least respond to 20 a day, and it never fails Mylot will go on the fritz for me at like 15 or 17 !!!

hi,friend,i love gardening and fishing...If i found gap for my lot due to internet problems,i will immediately shift to my garden.I will see the requirements for garden fertilizers,pesticides,irrigation...

Usually I drum my fingers on the desk while I play some spider solitaire.. but today I ate lunch and watched the show I tape everyday (in order to avoid the commercials) the 4th season of 24.. that's something else I'm addicted to..

I think you probaly need to get some things off your computer, like some emails or, maybe your internet is being scanned automatically. that's what happens when mind is being scanned for viruses, I use to just let it scan and do somethig else while it is scanning. I know that Mylot was down yesterday for a while but it was not down long.

It sure is frustrating when mylot is down and even worse when the internet is down! I remember a couple of weeks back I woke up at the same time my hubby did(at around 6:45) hoping to get more done on mylot. I usually wave my hubby good bye half asleep and then snuggle back into the covers..hehe, but that day I seemed to have had a refreshing night's sleep so I was wide awake. I came to the pc to log into mylot and was shocked to see my net connection was totally down..nothing was working..nada! I waited and waited hoping it will be up in an hour or two...and still nothing. I felt so mad that it had to happen on that day when I was up early. All I did was watch tv, clean around the house(that was one good thing..lol) and cook early. The worst part was the phone doesn't work if the net is down since its a VOIP connection. Talk about a lonely "detached from the world" day...phew! There have been times when I've had a list of discussions to start on mylot and the site is down for maintenance..tsk tsk!Thankfully both my cable and net haven't gone off together, so if one isn't on the other comes to the rescue!:)

When the internet become sluggish, I may watch the video I downloaded through bit torrent facilities. When mylot is down, my used to writing my blog pages. Sometime I just stop the internet connection and play the games like sudoku, crossword etc.

Well this time while mylot was down it wasn't down for everyone and I was trying to contact them to let them know that many of us were having a problem. The other problem was that the link to contact them wasn't working either. So after conversing with a friend here through emails we determined that I could contact them through my private email and an email address that I had for them. This seemed to work and I went back and forth explaining the problem and they worked diligently to recreate said error and after about 2 hours it was back. They sent me one final message asking if it was working and I k=let them know that it was and thanked them so much as now I was able to go back to mylotting. Usually when it's down I go through my emails and work on the ones that I can respond to. Never thought of typing up my responses though and will keep that in mind for future maintenance. :)

wizzy 10mbps you are so lucky mine runsabout 1mbps and we are on broadband too! now you know why I posted the discussion about how many windows you use lol We didn't get notification and couldn't figure out why it kept jumping back to the home page when tried to get into discussions, thanks for clearing that up! Know the feeling of frustration - this place does start to take over your life a bit doesn't it? Personally I went to the kitchen to get my dinner so the timing was quite good! What did you do honey?

I too experienced the downtime on MyLot. I already had something to occupy the time, though...I had an appointment to work on one of the computers at church. You say you have broadband, and yet it has been going so slow, that dialup might be faster. Are you sure about this? If so, you seriously need to scan your computer for infections. If your connection is too slow to run online scanners, see if you can download AVG Anti-Spyware and a-squared from a friend's machine or something. Also, you might run HijackThis. I'm assuming you might not be able to interpret the results yourself, but there are plenty of forums where you could get help.

Today it happened to me too! Internet was really so slow! I have a 2Mbit access, not a 10Mbit like yours...and it's incredible that a 10Mbit access could slow too :-P but I believe you...sometimes it could happens! This morning at first was really difficult to load web pages (but I was not on mylot)...than I posted a reply here...and then ZAC mylot went down! With the same message (and picture) posted by you! LOL So I began playing a 3D adventure, called "Dreamfall - The longest journey". This is what I do while internet is unavaible or I want to write something on mylot and I can't do it because site is offline. I began playing a videogame. Many times I just turn off the monitor and go away to watch tv. Some other times, if I have any idea on what to write here, I open notepad and I start writing on it...and I save it on my desktop, so when I can go on mylot, I write here my discusssion.

When my computer stars to slow then I go into tools and delete all the temporary files due to the computer keeping all the sites where I have been to. Once that is done then the computer seems to work as normal.

It is quite frustrating when the internet link is slow or when my favourite website is behaving funny. It is all the more painful, considering my own situation in a poorly managed but otherwise rich developing African country, where electricity supply is low and unpredictable. You can imagine the pain when the scarce electricity is available, either through the utility body or by means of the expensive alternative through the private power generating set, but the internet is either down or slow or something! In my own environment here, one has got to strive hard not to lose one's sanity and heart to such inadequacies, the various versions of which we live with everyday. You should thank your stars and your able and visionary governments that have made life worth living for you overthere such that an occasional, slow internet link is a big deal. Probably to answer your question within the context of my own situation here, I have started reading interesting novels nowadays to kill boredom when there is either no electricity supply or the internet link is poor or unavailable. You have broader options in your own case.

i was wonder what was going on with mylot earlier-i couldn't post anything LOL. but i figured they must be fixing something. back to original question: i usually just shut it off and do some chores or work in photoshop til it speeds back up again. sometimes in summer it slows to a crawl,probably because the kids out and so many more are on the internet. you're right tho-even with cable it goes down to dial-up speed occasionally.

well i have faced this problems like net getting slow at critical times and at that moment theres i jus waited patiently and if its not gonan come then i just have to hang up and look for the other day. thats wat i use to do whe i feel its very important then i use to screw up the net service provider .

I'm a geek by trade and by hobby (yikes -- sounds like I should start a Geeks Anonymous chapter or something :P) so my first response to a slow internet connection (I'm on a 6mbit/sec down, 512kbit/sec up connection here) is to troubleshoot the local gear. Let's face it -- a Linksys router (even flashed with DD-WRT or OpenWRT) and a consumer-grade DSL modem aren't exactly "data center quality" gear, so those two are the first likely suspects. It happens once or twice a week that either the DSL modem or the wireless router that handles all the firewalling/routing spontaneously decides to declare war on the universe. This manifests itself in the form of "no packets in or out" or "no IP address for you!" which completely kills the connection. It also occasionally just slows things down to a miserable crawl. Since both devices store their configurations in flash memory, a simple power cycle resets both to sane states and generally everything's back up within 30 seconds. Shell sessions, chats, etc. don't even usually notice. If the connection is *working* but it's just dog slow, it's usually because some damned thing or other on one of my machines has decided to hog lots of bandwidth. Windows Update, on the one box where I actually run Windows XP, will chew up both CPU time (pegging it to 100%) and bandwidth if it decides there's an update (or a chance of one), so that never gets left on "automatic." If I'm downloading a torrent and the swarm suddenly gets a couple of good seeders, my downstream can occasionally get saturated, which makes everything sluggish. If the BitTorrent client gets skewed a bit and "forgets" its upload cap, it may decide to upload as fast as possible instead of at 30k/sec, which saturates upstream. That makes things even worse -- requests take forever to get out, and another ice age to get back. If the connection is actually down (and it's not just my gear that's misbehaving) and I really need to do something quickly, like commit a patch or check (or send) e-mail, I might actually get desperate enough to tether my notebook to the cell phone (Treo 650 on T-Mobile) to get online to do what's needed. Otherwise, I grab a book, play with one of the cats, and/or crank up some good music stored on my desktop. Ye gods, I'm a geek :)