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Pastimes : Computer Learning -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: thecow who wrote (19534)	5/7/2001 3:41:40 PM
From: Will Royston	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110652

A few observations on PC Pitstop tests: I like it; I use it; thanks to all for recommending it. PC Pitstop and BrowserTune complement each other, but PC Pitstop is quicker and less complicated than BrowserTune for checking and rechecking performance while trying out various tweaks. In particular, I've been using PC Pitstop to explore using various helper programs to improve my Internet connection speeds. The results were very interesting. (To me, anyway, but if you are easily bored with other people's minutiae please click "Next.") I'm using a 3Com PCI 56K v90 internal modem in my Dell PIII, 500M, 256M RAM, 20Gb hard drive. I run Windows 2000 Pro. W2K, by the way, is very stable and runs fine, thanks in part to good tune-up advice from the people who contribute to this group. I've come to like W2K much better than Win 98SE. However, I've long been dissatisfied with my Internet connection speeds. I found that 3Com does not support this particular modem that it sells to Dell. No help there. Furthermore, DSL, etc. will not be available in my small town for a long time, so modem dialup is it for the duration. My current ISP is EarthLink. My typical ISP connect speeds have always run at 33.3Kbps or slower. Then I found an additional modem init string at 3dspotlight.com. (Thank you, Thomas McGuire). That init string now has my modem dialing very quickly, and more importantly, shows the modem connecting consistently at 115.2 Kbps. I gather that the initial connection is nowhere near as important as the ongoing online connecting speeds. Even so, that's quite an amazing change, and it feels like an improvement. After that tweak I began to experiment with some other add-ins and to test the results of each change by using PC Pitstop, running it several times and averaging results for downloads, uploads, and pinging. I had previously downloaded several helper programs but subjectively couldn't see any improvement. I even thought they might be hindering my connections. That proved to be true. I started by using the Speedguide default download from www.speedguide.net to restore registry defaults for W2K. After that cleanup, I got these numbers: download 35-36Kbps, upload 47Kbps, pinging not great but okay. Then I used the Speedguide tweaks for W2K. The result? Download speeds dropped to 19Kbps, and uploads showed no changes. The next step was to restore the W2K defaults via Speedguide but to run Speedguide's Webtweak. Download speeds returned to about 36Kbps and uploads to 46. Pinging was maybe a little better. Next try was EasyMTU. Download speed dropped to a miserable 13Kbps, uploads to 41. I then tried my trial version of iSpeed. Downloads were at 19Kbps, uploads 45, and pinging was poor. Now I added in some modem registry tweaks I got from a detailed Windows 2000 Modem Tweak Guide by Keith "Farrel" McClellan at Tweak3D.net (www.tweak3d.net/tweak/win2kmodem) plus Easy MTU. This was interesting: downloads didn't improve (still 20Kbps) but uploads zoomed to 200-214Kbps! When I added the Speedguide W2k tweaks to those settings, there was no change in speed. Finally, I reran the two Speedguide default programs to remove the Speedguide tweak W2K and Speedguide web tweaks from the registry. Those left me with download speeds of 39-43Kbps-something I can live with-and uploads ranging between 181 and 238Kbps, and averaging above 200. Wonderful if true! But is it true? Well, PC Pitstop says so. My final step was to run BrowserTune to check on the PCPitstop results. BrowserTune confirmed them. At this point, I decided to leave well enough alone…for now. What did I learn from all this? Well, it kinda looks as though different machines are going to behave differently and get very different results from the same software or tweaks for reasons I am incapable of understanding. In my case, the added init string and some of the 3DTweak registry tweaks did change things for the better, but some other "helper" programs appeared to interfere with the natural optimization that I surmise to be built into Windows 2000 Pro. However, my personal results with EasyMTU and iSpeed and Speedguide are too unscientific to form any opinion about the worth of those programs to others. To me-that is, someone foolhardy enough to fiddle with settings despite a complete lack of expertise-it means don't automatically believe everything you hear about the wonderful add-ons without checking the actual results. PC Pitstop and BrowserTune let me do some of that due diligence. And whenever I get myself in serious trouble again, why, I'll just come running back to this fine group! Thanks for listening. Any feedback?