Any Internet Accelerators?

[mendhak]

What's the name of a good Internet Accelerator software? Preferably non-spyware based.

Oh, and do these things actually work? I've never tried it out.

[techgnome]

It only really works with if the ISP is using it.... way I understand it works, is that the ISP servers handle the request, get the page data (iamges, text and all that), compress it, and then stream it to your PC, where it gets uncompressed and displayed. But I could be wrong about that.

TG

[Ideas Man]

Don't install these, most of the time all they do is tweak your MTU and settings like that, they mostly stuff them up, slow down your connection and you have to reinstall Windows to fix it up. The do not work at all. The best net accelerator you can get is an ISP that caches the pages for you so that you don't have to travel all over the world to retreive the pages, or you get broadband or a good proxy . Infact, I'd say a good proxy, i got one at home for my broadband (seems pointless) but it actually does work quite good actually, had it with my dialup, noticed a huge speed increase, especially when it's setup right (mine automatically caches frequently used pages).

[mendhak]

Ok, thanks.

[si_the_geek]

I've seen what TG described, it boosted the effective speed from 49k to 115k. Of course it does require your ISP to initiate it all.

Apart from that all I've seen (that works) is download accelerators.. multi-threading downloads of different sections of a file. Haven't found one that is spyware free tho, and it doesnt help for regular browsing.

[Ideas Man]

I don't honestly see how multi-threadding files or whateva they call it speeds up the connection, instead of downloading the file as one stream, it's multiple smaller streams, if you think of it as water in a pipe, normal is the water taking the whole pipe and multi-threadding as little tubes inside the pipe or something like that, it would download at the same rate. The point being, you are limited by the bandwidth allocated to you so downloading the whole file at one time compared to multiple parts doesn't make a whole lot of sense as a speed booster.

[si_the_geek]

I understand your reasoning, but you are missing one little issue - the server you are downloading from limits the bandwidth per client, and multi-threading means you are acting as several clients at the same time, and therefore have a greater bandwidth at the server end.

Of course it will only give you a speed boost if the bandwidth to your ISP is higher than the bandwidth the server is letting you use.

[Ideas Man]

Maybe but when you think that lots of people would have some form of broadband and that they usually download at their full speed, multi-threadding isn't gonna increase that and i noticed that even with my dialup when i had it (R.I.P.), i downloaded a file normally, recorded the speed then multi-threadded it, added the individual speeds and 99/100 it was the same.

[si_the_geek]

Yup, it all depends on the server you are downloading from (hardware capacity and amount of users at the time) - I expect that with most it wont give any noticable improvement.

[Ideas Man]

Yeah, my point exactly. You can try it if you like and see if it works for you, if it does, good for you, if not, don't feel too bad, most people don't, it just appears that way.

[Madboy]

AOL - The DEFINITE answer