Computer Help II

Usually their problems aren't that weird; they just don't know how to describe them in the geek-familiar way.

These are ad sites; the slow page loads are probably ad content. You may be able to use a browser plugin like AdBlock Plus to suppress loading of these ads and speed up your pages. You could also put these sites into your router's blacklist.Try running traceroute to some of these addresses. (On Win7 go to the start menu, enter "cmd" into the "Search programs and files" box to bring up the command line, then enter "tracert google-analytics.com", for example.) You're looking for "hops" where packets timeout or are lost. Try doing this on any website you find takes a long time to load.

I think uninstalling as many malware tools as possible should be the first step. There's no reason to run more than one, and Windows Defender can't be taken out of Windows 7 (to my knowledge). There's no reason to run a "belt-and-suspenders" approach, here, especially when the performance hit per malware tool is so high.Most people's computers aren't slowed by malware, they're slowed by the half-dozen malware scanners they're running. The cure is as bad as the disease, here.Assuming Moose lives a clean lifestyle of running Chrome or Firefox and never even opening IE or downloading porn movies, I don't think malware is his problem; I think it's that Duluth, like Lincoln, is one of those places where your packets to and from a lot of sites run through a single bottleneck and when that bottleneck gets misconfigured, there's just no rhyme or reason to which sites will be affected.Used to be I could access every site on the internet except Dominos.com, because of a misconfigured router in Chicago. When Dominos moved the hosting of their online ordering site, suddenly I could order pizza the way God intended: without speaking to another human being.I think if he just puts the sites he listed into his router blacklist he should notice a speed increase.

Like I said, they're ads. Google-analytics is Google's advertising-tracking outfit; when you load a page being tracked by Google Analytics it sends a request to their servers.It's not malware; it's the banner ads and "sponsored links" that appear on everybody's blog, news sites, basically everywhere. Are you not aware how all that works? Bloggers and website managers sign up with AdSense or a similar outfit to sell advertising space, and when you load that webpage, a line of code in the HTML ("ads go here") tells your browser to head over to AdSense and grab an ad (their choice, based on who links to your website.)That's why he's waiting on requests to Google Analytics and the like - embedded ads in the webpages he's loading. But there's some kind of network routing issue, probably nowhere near his end, that means that packets from AdSense take a lot longer to receive than packets from the webpage he's visiting. That's not surprising - the ads are dynamically generated every time they're requested by browsers, based on information from your cookies, your IP, your location (derived from IP), and how you got to that website in the first place. That processing takes some overhead as I'm sure you're aware. And the network latency between Moose and Google Analytics is apparently much higher than the latency between Moose and the website itself.Blocking them at his router means his browser spends a lot less time waiting for AdSense to get packets back to him - the router returns the error message immediately. The "downside" is that he doesn't see the ad, but who gives a shit? Win-win if you ask me. One of the disadvantages to the internet moving from government networks (NSFnet, the university system backbones) to commercial networks (MCI, etc) is that the internet became much less redundant. It no longer "routs around damage" to the same extent.It's likely that every residential ISP in your neighborhood leases their bandwidth from a single source, who itself leases bandwidth from a major commercial backbone. That's a considerably smaller amount of redundancy that means a lot more people can be affected by a loss of a single node.There was a case several years ago where residential internet access was interrupted for the entire state of Minnesota because a homeless man lit a fire under a highway overpass and burned through an internet trunk line. The internet no longer routs around damage.

Oh, I thought I was clearer. Sorry.1) Moose said his browser was hanging on requests from specific websites (which I recognized as ad servers.) Malware causes general, across-the-board slowdown. ISP and local network config problems are more likely to break your internet access altogether.2) I had something similar happen to me and I traced it to packets that were being eaten by something in Chicago. Nothing I could do, really. (I mean I really went all out - flushed settings, OS re-installs, tried from multiple devices, power-cycled every link in my network, connection tests, speed tests, ping, everything.)I used to work tech support so I guess I have a sense for problems. The fact that Moose gets all his speed back on another network - I suspect he's at work or up on campus or something - makes me think it has nothing to do with his computer, and much to do with the fact that residential and academic internet access runs through separate backbones. (I guess there's still some redundancy.)