Thread: Difficulties watching ABC iView, SBS On Demand etc

Personally, I'd swap out the modem. iView should be fine on connections over 1mbps.

This - https://www.softperfect.com/products/networx/ (mentioned by another forum member elsewhere) has a nice speed monitoring tool that might help you pin things down more....how does youtube work?

speed.JPG

Thanks MS. Yes I've been thinking about doing just that. Even when I clicked to reply to this it was back-circling for 20 seconds or more and no activity on the modem. It's the middle of the day - local traffic can't be that high.

You haven't said how much memory is installed in the laptop. I have one computer left on XP (out of 5) and it is a 2.0GHz single core a bit older than yours. I resurrected this a few months ago when after moving the rest of the XP fleet to Win 7, I discovered that I could find not a viable W7 driver for my colour printerset waiting which has a new set of carts in it and a spare .

Once the XP box was running, with up to date antivirus and all the windows patches for it, it was barely capable of opening a single page PDF document. As I liberated Ram from the W7 units, I ended up with a couple of 1GB sticks which I swapped into the XP box doubling its RAM. It is now performing similar to to what it did as a new high spec laptop when I purchased it about 9 years ago. Mobo in it is ancient enough to be chip limited to 2 x 1GB modules, but it came from an era when XP minimum requirement was 256MB and recommended was 512, so the original 1GB was fairly impressive. All software has bloated so much in the intervening time that 2GB is now a safe minimum.

That unit, dual core 1.2GHz, and 2.4GHz all run Iview without hassle, mostly over wireless G links around the house. The dual cores on W7 are running 2GB for the 1.2GHz (chip limited) and 4 GB on the 2.4GHz units. All were top of the line Dell busines computers on XP with 1GB when new around 1996, now $75 plus $40 for memory upgrade type computers.

PS there have been a few memory hungry updates for XP and W7 lately as well.

Originally Posted by malb

You haven't said how much memory is installed in the laptop.

I forget. How can I check it?

Found the RAM in the control panel: 3.5Gb

Ok, a bit more research.

Have installed Networx (I like it) and it does not show any unusual activity (like somebody hacked in to my modem).

My partner has no trouble at all watching iView on any of her Mac devices (big one, little one, iPad4). That would appear to rule out the modem I believe (unless there's something REALLY tricky going on). Her laptop (Mac Air) and iPad are connected to the modem by wireless.

I thought perhaps it might be my LAN cable, so I disconnected it from the modem and connected by wireless. I thought I saw an immediate increase in page loading speed, but too hard to be accurate there. So, I fired up iView and started up George Gently. It ran nicely for 5-10 minutes and then slowed right down, but not quite to freeze frame, then it picked up to normal again (this is rare with the LAN cable, but not unheard of). Right now it's pretty ordinary but superior to normal with a LAN. It is definitely "normal" speed more often on wireless

That doesn't really lead to any conclusion: I would have thought that a LAN would be more capable than wireless, but the wireless is definitely overall better than the LAN cable. It's actually watchable.

Speed test (ookla) on LAN cable this morning showed 10 Mbps, on wireless showed 9.5, so that indicates that either way I'm getting the max I can out of the ADSL2+ in this area.

When iveiw went slow on wireless just now I ran ookla and it showed 7Mbps - significantly slower than 10 minutes earlier, but still should be plenty for iVeiw.

I must say that at the moment (23 minutes in to Gently, on wireless) it is the smoothest run I've seen in a helluva long time - not actually watching - just keeping an eye on the video speed It's varying between good and a little annoying but ok. Only for a brief period did it slow right down.



So, what does that tell me? Wireless is better than the LAN cable I was using, but still not as good as it should be, so there must be two things going on.

I'll try a different LAN cable and see what i get.

Could it be anything to do with graphics acceleration or summink?

Oh man, this is so hard to work out. I paused iVeiw because any web page was sloooow to load. Ran a speed test which shows 5.6mbps - not good but hardly disastrous.

Then it went back to normal video speed on iVeiw so I ran a speedtest to see how that would affect the video - no effect, all smooth, and 8mbps.

At 3.5GB , memory is basically maxed out for 32 bit versions of XP. There are some 64 bit installs out there that can handle more, but they are much rarer as driver support was never great in the peripheral area, i.e printer drivers etc are much more readily available for 32bit than 64bit, as is the case with a lot of other classes of peripheral.

It is possible that you have a chip limited motherboard that can detect additional memory but not access it. My 12in Dell for instance, and the 17inch Medion that is still on XP both have mobo's that only access a total of 2GB. The Dell currently has 512MB onboard as module 1 and a 2GB installed in the module 2 slot, for a total of 2.5GB. The BIOS and control panel recognise the total memory installed, but the chipset interfacing the processor and memory can only address 2GB so that is all the computer uses. The Medion left the shop with 2 of 512MB modules in the 2 slots, and was recently upgraded to 2x 1GB modules removed from other Dells being upgraded from 2GB to 4GB. During the first upgrade, I tested the whole fleet with the 2GB modules with a view to upgrading all computers. The Medion would not boot with either a single or two 2GB modules, or with a 512MB and a 2 GB, but was quite happy with 1GB or 1GB plus 512MB modules, leading me to believe that the chipset is limiting it to 1GB per module.

If you load Task Manager and look at the Performance tab, it will graph processor and memory utilisation over time which might give an indication of memory use. The Processes tab will show all of the processes operating and indicate odd things that should not be running.

The only other suggestions I can make is to check the free space on your hard disk, and the state of fragmentation of the disk. If the disk has little free space or is badly fragmented, it can only write data in small blocks, and this really slows the system down.

My little Dell on Win 7 is more than happy playing HD youtube, Iview, or 7plus video with 2GB and a 1.2GHz dual core. The medion is equally happy doing the same on XP with 2GB and a 2GHz single core processor, but both have plenty of free space on the drive and regular defragmenting.

Networx is only showing what is happening on your PC connection - won't look at any other device on the network (ie the modem).

Do you have a wireless card you could try in your PC? It still might be the modem, with some sort of hardware issue for wired connections.

Originally Posted by Master Splinter

Networx is only showing what is happening on your PC connection - won't look at any other device on the network (ie the modem).

It can be set to look at the modem so it monitors all traffic through. I did that this morning when my partner had a Skype conference. Very consistent flow throughout the duration, and then fell off a cliff when she ended it.

Originally Posted by Master Splinter

Do you have a wireless card you could try in your PC? It still might be the modem, with some sort of hardware issue for wired connections.

Not quite with you there MS - I've already run it on wireless.

Originally Posted by FenceFurniture

I thought perhaps it might be my LAN cable, so I disconnected it from the modem and connected by wireless.

My partner's main Mac run's off a LAN cable and no problems with iView.

Mal, it's a 32Gb Solid state hard drive with about 25% available. I defragged last weekend, but there was something a bit weird there. It said that there was x amount of files that couldn't be defragged. Also, afterwards it says it still needs defragging. I did it about 6 times but not getting any better result. In fact the defrag ended up taking only about 30 seconds - but it still recommends a defrag..

WINDOWS folder is almost 9Gb, Programs Folder is about 3.5Gb, but they can't be moved (can they? - at least not without serious maintenance /reinstalling?). No idea what I'm doing on that score.

I've moved everything off that drive that I know how to (onto an external drive - to which things are MUCH faster to save). I'd like to move other stuff such as the program files to free up more space but I just don't know what I'm doing there.

There are generally about 60+ processes running when I look at the Task Manager. Again, I don't know what the great majority are so I don't terminate them.

I haven't cleared cookies for a while (prefer not to) - currently about 647kb.

I'll put up a couple of screen shots of the contents of C drive tomorrow. There's a couple of other big folders like "i386"which is 1.25Gb. Absolutely nfi what it is.

One of the difficulties that I have is that this computer used to be part of a network at a place I used to work at. There are various logins and desktops and so on.For example, Documents and Settings has four folders in it:
Administrator(20Mb)
All Users (490Mb)
"My user name" (my real name)(2.81Gb - even though I store bugger all in there - all my files that I use now are on the external HD)
Default User (a hidden folder)(17.4 Mb)

All of these things take their toll on a poor little 32Gb SS HD (it was one of the first). I have stacks of room on the external HD which is 120Gb (only 34Gb used).

There are three drives which are not connected, but always show up:
Removable disk F
Removable disk H (which was the server at the previous work)
My Vault (Z

If I click the remove hardware icon in the tray it says they are removed, but they reappear when i restart.

The PC used be attended to by the IT guys there and i have no idea what they did or what i can therefore delete.

A SSD does not need defragging (in fact it can't actually be done - there is a wear levelling algorithm in the SSD that allocates memory based on evenly spreading the writes around), however XP was pre SSD, so it won't know this - it'll sit there and attempt it, but the firmware in the drive doesn't write in what XP would consider a consecutive fashion so it'll never really optimise!

http://www.howtogeek.com/165472/6-th...Speed=noscript

If it's still got work related settings, I'd really be looking at downloading drivers and doing a clean install - if you no longer have the install disc you can download from here - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/downl...ils.aspx?id=24 (The licence key should be on a sticker on the PC).

I'd also keep in mind that the SSD may be getting near the end of its life (and some of the first SSDs had firmware that was...unreliable, to say the least...may your paranoid firmware rot in hell, OCZ), especially if XP has been giving it a flogging with the swap file and other SSD unfriendly activities. Amazingly, it's still possible to get IDE SSDs!

Thanks very much for the links MS.

Whenever I run defrag on the C drive it gives me the usual chart with red, green and blue pieces all over the place, and they do change after the defrag. Whenever I analyse either the external HD (must be SS) or my flash stick (definitely SS) it just shows the file all in one contiguous lump (as you say) and of course says they don't need to be defragged.

Is that consistent with what you were thinking (re the C drive in particular)?

Yes, there's no point in defragging an SSD (or any flash storage media) - all it does is increase the wear and tear on the memory cells unnecessarily, shortening their life. There may be some small benefit in running it very, very occasionally on an XP machine (more related to optimising memory block use than fragmentation) but this is because XP doesn't understand SSDs and doesn't issue some of the commands/perform writes/perform erases in an SSD optimal way.

As for the block map shown by the defrag utility...think of it as fiction. In order for the SSD to talk to your XP PC, the SSD has to fake being a spinning disk, so the block map doesn't correlate to what is actually happening across the SSD memory cells. Other devices (different age, different firmware) may simply not report this information.

There are a stack of articles about tweaks for SSDs on XP...but it's one of those areas where there are lots of opinions and nothing really definitive!