Thread: Difficulties watching ABC iView, SBS On Demand etc

George Gently as a speed test is doubtful - could just be Martin Shaw in one of his slow and ponderous modes.

Neil

Originally Posted by malb

How much of the software installed do you need, and how much of that do you have the install disks for. Personally I think a bigger SSD might be the go, which of course suggests a fresh install of the OS and software. Its a lot of hassle to do, but makes the computer perform like new again. I would possibly look at stepping up to W7 at the same time, the hardware would handle it, provided that you can get drivers for printers etc. The issue with XP is that MS stopped supporting it finally almost 12 months ago, but still seem to shipping updates for it, and every update loads the machine more and leaves less memory and processor availability for the user. The story of my my old Medion's gradual decline.

If that is not something that appeals, I would go to Auslogics site and down load their free Registry cleaner and Registry defragmenter and give them a run to check the registry and re-sort it. You don't have to allow them to make changes at the first run, but they will detail the number of things that you could allow them to fix. If the list is huge, then the computer has been configured for a lot of peripherals or software in the past that is no longer available to the computer, but has multiple registry entries that are slowing down the computer. If I was closer, I would offer to help find you install discs and do a reinstall to a larger SSD.

I recently bought a couple of new 128MB SSD's for $90 delivered as the smaller capacity SSD's are being cleared out as obsolete now. 256MB where available for $80-90 a few weeks ago. With all the machines we have, we run a network with 1TB portable drives for main storage, and very little is stored on the local drives, so 128MB SSD's as local drives. The baby Dell I am using at the moment in the Family room has it's original 60GB 1.8inch drive installed as the local drive and has 60% free capacity, with a wide range of software loaded.

Thanks Mal. I'll digest all of that tomorrow.

Originally Posted by brontehls

George Gently as a speed test is doubtful - could just be Martin Shaw in one of his slow and ponderous modes.

Neil

I've cleared out the vast majority of the cookies (some going back years).

I had a look at the Firefox certificates and there's a whole raft of them too, including some very bizarre looking stuff:




What can they be about?

Certificates are a way of proving the authenticity of a site - essentially it is (or should be) a third party site endorsing that the site you are visiting really is who it says it is. Related to that little padlock symbol you see in browsers.

Importantly, it means you can use their public key (we're talking encryption here) to open a SSL session with them so that the content exchanged between you and them cannot be snooped on by others (all the other people will see is a string of random looking characters).

goog.JPG

The key length shown - 128 bit - means that the crypto key used is 2 to the power of 128 bits long - or has 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000* possibilities, which is generally considered impossible to brute force with any foreseeable future development of binary computers.

* I may be off by a decimal place or two...

But many sites - such as Google, above - self certify and issue their own certificate. It's up to you if you decide to trust them or not!

Here is a graph from Networx, while I was just *watching* something on iView. Unfortunatley I think it tells us bugger all:



In the high use areas the vision was almost normal and also terrible, with the audio starting to crap out.

In the low use areas the vision was usually terrible and also ......nearly normal.


That was with Networx monitoring only my Laptop wireless connection.


During dinner, I'm going to change it to monitor the modem, and set up the iPad and let something run on iView.

Well, I think I can prove something now. The following graph shows the iPad running iView (up to the end of the flat part under the label)

Then we kicked off the Mac Air Lap top

Then we kicked off the Big Mac (as everybody should do )


They were all (3) running video as smooth as silk. Surely that proves beyond any doubt that there is nothing wrong with the Modem????

The last part of the graph sows the 3 Mac devices running and two windows running iView on my Dell - one in Chrome and one in Firefox. I kicked off Chrome first (with whatever cache it takes) and then Firefox with the manual override of 1Gb cache. Firefox started almost immediately and was running while Chrome was still thinking about it.

Both Firefox and Chrome had crap video (stuttering frames) and the 3 Mac devices were still perfect.





So, I think that proves the modem is ok and that there is definitely something up with the settings or something on my Dell.

I've been wondering if the video card driver might need an update (mainly because I can't seem to find an answer with anything else).

So, I went to this site:

http://www.nvidia.com/download/drive...px/58446/en-us

This is the image of the latest update available, with my current version also displayed. Seems to be quite a difference in the numbers so maybe my driver is waaaaay out of date?



This is out of my comfort zone so I thought I'd seek some advice before doing anything.

Here is the System info. BIOS version is pretty old (2008).

Hit the button, do the update, but note the note about that "first install this Dell software update" to see if it is relevant to your system!

Rightio, downloaded, took a system restore point before installation, installed new driver - doesn't make a blind bit of difference.

It's always the same routine with iView - good for 3-5 minutes after the initial window opening, and then downhill it goes. It'll probably get better at some point but then down it goes again. When it starts going downhill the rest of the webpages are slow too - to the point where sometimes I can't even select a tab without a major delay - the cursor even disappears.

I did some research on Video Buffer size, but all I could turn up there was a guy saying if you have problems with stuttering then change the virtual memory to half recommended, and change it down again if that doesn't work. Well, I changed it from 2Gb to 1 Gb and the only difference I see is that pgms take a little longer to open - no affect on iView at all.

I think I'm starting to run out of options. I created as much space as I can on the SS HD by running disk cleanup as well as compressing old files - have 10Gb free now which should be plenty.

Your next option sounds like a complete reinstall...or a new lappie!

As posted in the other thread, It will be interesting to see what this poll turns up then.