How to troubleshoot slow Internet

If you have an Internet connection at work or at home, chances are you have faced this screen before.

Did you know slow Internet is one of the major reasons why computers getting smashed? If you didn’t, that’s because it’s not true. Nevertheless, it does create a lot of frustration and one of the primary reasons why you end up hating your Internet provider. A lot of you have asked me to write on this topic and so here is a list of things you should do if your Internet is slow or not working at all.

Check your Internet speed

A good way to check (something that even customer care agents ask you to do) is to go to www.speedtest.net and check your Internet speed. This website gives you both your downloading and uploading speed. For most people, they need to care only about the download speed. Upload speed is for people who are dealing with things like uploading photos to cloud or uploading a video on YouTube.

In fact, more often than not, if you call customer care for slow speeds, one of the first things they do is to ask you to check your speed using the same website mentioned above. And no, going on Google and checking if you have Internet is not the best idea. There is a possibility that Google’s homepage might load and still do not have Internet. This is because of a thing called cache memory. (pronounced: ca-shay) This is a temporary storage that browsers have to improve your performance. Browsers tend to save the home pages (or in some cases most visited) of websites so they take less time to load. This increases performance and your favorite websites load faster. You should check your Internet speed and see if you really are getting the speeds that your Internet plan states.

Check the placement of your wireless router

If the slow Internet speed is a one-time thing and never happened again. You can probably just forget about it. But if it is a recurrent thing, one thing you can do is check where you have placed your wireless router. You should ideally place it on a raised platform, away from walls and in the center of the house from where it can reach all directions equally.

But this is not often the case. If you are unable to follow the above guidelines for placement of the router, you should make sure it is away from thick objects. This reduces the interference from the walls to some extent since walls are one of the primary reasons of wireless signal blockage in a home.

The other thing you should do is to make sure the you have not placed your router near an electro-magnetic device. Some examples of electromagnetic devices in a house are microwaves and radios. The electromagnetic signals from these devices could interfere with the signal from the router destructively. This could possibly result in patchy signal that would reduce speed or disconnection.

Check your modem’s Internet settings

There is a web interface of your router that you can access to troubleshoot your wireless connection. To do this, you will need to get to your router and look for a small tag from the manufacturer. That tag will have a domain name where you can reach your router’s web portal, the password that you will have to use once asked and also a MAC address (short for Media Access Control) which is the physical address of your device and unique to it.

Once you have the domain name and the password, hop onto your favorite browser and type in the domain name in the address bar. This could be either the IP address (10.xx.xx.xx) or a domain name. From there, depending on the router’s manufacturer, you can change various settings about your router. I will be talking about the settings in the router in-depth in a later article. Stay tuned for it. For now, what you have to look for is the channel it is on under the ‘Wireless’ setting. Change the channel and see if it improves your connection.

Check the extensions in your browser

A lot of my readers use Chrome. It is a fast browser when it comes to performance but it comes as a price. Chrome is notorious to take up more RAM in your computer and thus slow down your computer as a result. Also, most users are not careful about what sites they visit, a lot of them being malicious. If you end up downloading a document from the website you can be a target of an adware. An adware can attach itself to your browser by means of plugins.

These extensions are not visible on the main Chrome page but are still enabled in the settings. These run in the background, taking up bandwidth and thus slowing down the Internet speed for you. To check what extensions are enabled on your browser, read the following steps:

Step 1: Go to Chrome, then click on the 3 vertical dots on the top right side of the browser.

You can see that I have an extension enabled called Adblock Plus.

Step 2: Click on More Tools and select Extensions

Step 3: Uncheck all the extensions that you do not need. If you have never seen this screen and browse on the Internet a lot, chances are that you will see a lot of extensions that are Enabled here. These cause your Chrome to slow down which may give you the feeling that your Internet is slow. Some might even have an active malware that is tracking your browsing history.

Check for any rogue downloads in your computer

Always check your downloads folder to see if there is any large file being downloaded. Often times, while browsing on the Internet, you can click on a file and it starts downloading. You will have to make sure that there are no such download process and stop them if there is any you don’t recognize.

Check if you are sharing your WiFi with unknown devices

Go to the modem’s wireless settings once again and go to the Sharing section. You will be able to see what IP addresses and devices are connected to your router in real time. If you see a device that is not something in your household, change your router password immediately. You do not want strangers to access your network without your knowledge. This can also be a security threat as they could launch an attack using your network and it will be through your home IP address.

Call your Internet Service Provider (ISP)

If nothing else works, do not hesitate to call your local Internet Service Provider and ask them about the network outage. By following the above steps, you would be able to troubleshoot about 70% of the Internet problems. But there are times when ISPs have network difficulties in which case you won’t be able to do anything. They could even inform you of any network filters that they might have put in your locality to fight of an attack. Nevertheless, don’t hesitate to contact your service provider if you suspect it is responsible for your slow internet connection.