to go on strike until I am provided with a computer that ACTUALLY BLOODY WORKS?!

[HecateTrivia]

FYI. The answer, unless you have a death wish, is no.

I hate computers. This one in particular. I am typing each sentence here and sitting back and waiting for it to catch up with me.

I am unable to edit my website. It took 2 hours to do an edit that should normally take half an hour. What with frozen screens, and info not loading and all that and don't get me STARTED on the speed or lack thereof of the internet connection.

I am self employed and also work for my husband's business.I want a new computer. We cannot afford a new computer but I want one anyway. I cannot be expected to work under these conditions. And then there's that wonderful moment when I apply changes to an article and I get the message "internet explorer cannot display the webpage" and I have to be physically restrained from chucking a brick through the bloody screen.

We have a bloody ISO audit coming up. How the holy hell am I suposed to get ready for that when I would actually be better off etching info into ruddy SLATE than working on this damned thing.

Do you want to know how long it's taken me to post this? FIFTEEN BLEEDING MINUTES!

I can type over 70 words a minute - I should not be sitting here waiting for a pigging computer to frigging well CATCHUP!

Apparently, since there's nothing to be done but put up with it, I should not get annoyed

After I have thrown the pc through the window, I shall be throwing HIM!!!!!!!!

iggly - you run a speed test? The 54m should be the synch speed as opposed to the DSLAM transmission speed - usually quite a lower than the max throughput. of course the link between the router and the machine itself may be the bottle neck. 54mbps often get throttled by the wireless connection unless of course you are on gigabit etherenet

FOUR TIMES. And yes. I am. Much as I normally love a good deep inspection.

I will have a crack at Lucifer when I get home.

I will be very cross indeed if malware/virus/whathaveyou has snuck past kaspersky!

voice, I think it's the wireless as my iPhone also has similar problems. Will run a speed test.

Will a new router help? We did buy a new one last year but it's slowed down again. The pc is about 2m from the router (in the same room) but it still drops the connection regularly.

Iggly - try using a wire. use the ethernet cable and run a speed test - loads of them on the net - they download a file and time it.

New router may not solve it. It might be the wireless card in your computer. It might be the settings on the router, it might be 5.4mbs or 54mbps. YOu may be throttled by your ISP or have significant contention issues. Almost never get the full advertised speed for all the above reasons.

Ok thanks. The wireless dongle is very old now though so could be a factor.

ah wireless dongle - that could be your prob. Suggest digging up an etherenet cable from somewhere and physically plug it in. Most modern routers are running on 802.11 G or N. Old wireless dongles use a or b. the a standard would throttle you to 11mb

Could it be Windows update running in the background? I had that problem with our craptop, I managed to disable the automatic update and it started working at a reasonable speed again. Then DH broke it again

Great will try later! Am in the phone at the moment, will get on PC ASAP. Thanks again.

Once you go Mac - theres no going back..smug :-)

My computer at work is shockingly bad, and as the business is very reliant on the speed I can work you'd think theyd replace it with a good one. Nope. I'm fed up of them just thinking a defrag and updating IE will work.

"Once you go Mac - theres no going back..smug :-)"

Thats right, because the software isnt rarely backwards compatible. Find a Mac the age of the OPs machine and see if it runs anything written today :)

OP - run CCleaner, check the drive isnt full, download and run malwarebytes to check for malware.

Packard Bell though. Are they still making machines under that name? It must be years old. You can get entry level machines from Dell for £250 or so. Or the same from Apple in an aluminium shell for £750

Speaking of mac, the upstairs managers all were bought £1500 machines, while we're stuck on years old crappy things.

The funny thing is the system we use isn't compatible on the mac OS. so they have to run windows on them tee hee.

www.mybroadbandspeed.co.uk/

test your BB spend 1st. I signed up for 20 something boadband but only get 4.5

but if you pan to buy one get one made by a PC shop you will get more for your money.

My husband is a gamer so had a gaming pc built almost 1/2 the price PC world and other big retailers wanted

looktoshinford? which software do you refer to? ONce the move to intel was made by apple - backwards compatibility has never been an issue. The problem that MS has is similar with a lot of their newer products. All down to code bloat and vast numbers of drivers for OEM.

As for the dell for 250 - i do suggest doing a £ for £ comparison. Yup you can buy a dell for £250 but the inners will be bottom of the range. Horses for courses - most people use less than 10% of the grunt on a machine. The minute you want to do some proper heavy lifting you need the grunt - and there the machines are pretty evenly matched. Then again some people are biased against entire environments. I use macs, PCs, iPhones and blackberrys. They all have their uses - but for my personal use - I will only use Apple. It might cost more - but then strangely it turns out significantly more durable.

Back home now. I just used that broadband speed thing and it said that download speed was 5120kbps and upload speed 276kbps

the icon thingie on my desktop says speed 54mbps and signal strength excellent

I have no idea what any of that means. Can anyone translate?

HecateTrivia. Yup. Actual download speed from internet is 5mbps (upload is pretty grim and the root of your problems IYSWIM @276kbps or the might 36kbytes). The desktop / signal strength tells you the connection between your router and your machine. Not as we suspected the bottleneck.

The upload should be at least double that - might be a word with your ISP i think.

It means your broadband speed is fine. The 54mbps is the speed of your wireless, not the speed of your broadband (this is not the same thing - your wireless connection can be blisteringly fast, but if the broadband connection coming into the house is slow it won't help) That's not the issue here though, the data you got from speedtest tells you the connection is fine. (Twice the speed of mine, and pages load instantly here and I can use it for online gaming)

The problem is your PC in some way. RAM could be an issue if it doesn't have a lot of it and adding more might help; however my money is on there being something on it slowing it down, perhaps just an accumulation of several years worth of minor issues, or alternatively some form of malware. If I were you I'd back up anything important, wipe the HD and reinstall Windows (which is a drastic solution but often much, much quicker than tracking down the actual problem in cases like this, once things get quite as bad as you're describing.) However I guess you're probably not confident doing that. Try running a little program called malwarebytes download here and letting it fix anything it finds; if for some reason you have a malware problem that'd be a quick fix.

Do you have any knowledgeable friends or relatives who'd take a look at it for you and see if they can diagnose it at least? This is the kind of problem that's really, really hard to diagnose without seeing the machine, but may or may not be a relatively easy fix - if I were anywhere near you I'd be happy to come look at it, I often do this for friends. If it's something I reckon I can fix with a few hours on a rainy Saturday afternoon, or I reckon I can't fix it but a reinstall will, I take it away and do it for them; if I think the problem goes beyond my expertise I can at least tell them that and then they can take it to a shop with some prior knowledge of what the issue is.

I have checked the RAM. it says 512MB Ram

It also says Intel (R) Pentium (R) 4 CPU 2.93GHz 2.93GHZ

I have no idea what that means.

anyway, I have found a very nice man who is going to come out on monday and beat the computer into submission

OMG - words fail me.

Beating the computer into submission won't work - dropping it into a skip will.

Seriously your iPhone has more memory and power!

It means that what you have there is an antique, Hecate. I'm not blaming you for being frustrated with it! The specs you give there are more or less equivalent to the mid-level Dell desktop I bought when I went away to university, 9 years ago. Is there any way you could scrounge together a few hundred quid for a replacement? The very cheapest desktop pc in the shop would be lightning fast and vastly superior to what you've got.

Oh, and he's doing it for the princely sum of thirty pounds.

I may kiss him

And no, don't waste your money on a man to beat it into submission. As the poster above says, it will not help. It's like taking a 1920s car into the shop and asking the mechanic to make it go 200 miles an hour. It can't do it, the technology isn't up to it.

x-post.

oh dear. am I wasting my time then? Can it not be upgraded in some way?

I suppose I could look on ebay or something.

Give me a clue. What would I be looking for in terms of specs?

The kids can have this one then.

Naoko and I are as one on this. Save your cash - they can't fix that machine I'm afraid. sell a kidney - get a decent spec machine :-)