Just got cable, have questions

I have allways tried to do safe surfing with my dial up. I have ZoneAlarm, AVG updated whenever needed. Now that I have "high speed internet" I have several questions. I have been through your download site categories as follows

Benchmark, Diagnostic and Internet tools.

You have so much there that I'm overwhelmed

1 Need to know if my ISP's claim of 50x 56K speed is somewhat true and what is realistic and how to test.

2 Is my protection good enough for an always on connection?

3 WOOHOOO!!! This is great.

Thanks for any input.

augie

 

Ok well first check here www.dslreports.com go to tool speed test.
Likely your speed will be about 1mbit download or higher, but dont expect too high gets hopes up. Anyway that protection is fine, personaly i run no AV but a hardware firewall. i just run a weekly online scan. it depends on your habits i guess. What you have is fine

 

Hello Iamien,

Results are 756 KBPS down and 163 up. A little better than dial up!!

Thanks for the link.

augie

Just did the math. By their statments I should be getting "up to 2800 KBPS" Erm that's a far cry from their marketing statements. I would have accepted 1/2 and been happy

 

hey auggie,

thanks for replying to my post

anyway, DSL and Cable work SOMEWHAT simlarly, in that they provide MUCH more bandwith than can be alotted per connection.

In that sense, you most likely have around 2800kbps (2.8MBPS) available to you, in the form of 2 or 3 700kpbs downloads (remember these are ideal settings, no matter what the ISP's are mean mean evil people and those settings are RARELY reached)

As for security, its all hype, there isnt much to be concerned about, as long as you have an active virus scanner, and check frequently for possible trojans and whatnot that might have snuck their way in.

Zonalarm is a good method. of just about ruining the internet lol. I cant stand the thing cause of its constant "asking for approval", but if you can handle it, it works.


Also, since you are using XP, chech this site out for tweaking it to get the best possible connectons

http://www.askmarvin.ca/

 

Hello In yearsTo Come,

Man, your alias is tough to type properly You must have not seen my post mentioning that I have a download speed of 756 kbps as per dslreports.com. Man, thats a far cry from 2800 kbps.
I would like to have 1/2 of that!!

Any tweaks for a semi-newbie??

Thanks

augie

Just noticed your link at the bottom of your post Going now to check this out. thanks

 

Re: cable....

Try this site, it will give you some pretty good info on your setup and provide some improvement tips if need be.

http://www.pcpitstop.com

 

Your best bet is to go here http://www.speedguide.net/
for tweaking your connection.
Go to Main Forums and you'll get all the help you need

 

As jujet posted, Id go here: http://www.speedguide.net/Cable_modems/cable_patches.shtml

Get the faster web page loading patch and the correct patch for the OS you are using, Ive seen a nice boost using them, hopefully you will too

 

Holy F*********

I don't believe all the answers that I have received!!!!!

I will check each response and will try to determine which is the best for my situation. Man , I*'ve got more work than I thought.

Thanks to all

augie

 

OK It's 9:15 PM or so here. PCPITSTOP says

1 507 kb/s
2 296 kb/s
3 232 kb/s
4 266 kb/s

This is the heavy traffic time.

Here's Speed Guide's numbers. ?????

SpeedGuide.net TCP/IP Analyzer
TCP properties for IP = 66.130.39.126 (modemcable126.39-130-66.mtl.mc.videotron.ca)
Browser/OS = Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
Note: Read the FAQ if the above is not your IP address.

TCP options string = 020405b401010402

MTU = 1500
MTU is fully optimized for broadband.

MSS = 1460
Maximum useful data in each packet = 1460, which equals MSS.

Default Receive Window (RWIN) = 17520
RWIN Scaling (RFC1323) = 0 bits
Unscaled Receive Window = 17520
RWIN is a multiple of MSS
Other values for RWIN that might work well with your current MTU/MSS:
513920 (MSS x 44 * scale factor of 8)
256960 (MSS x 44 * scale factor of 4)
128480 (MSS x 44 * scale factor of 2)
64240 (MSS x 44)

bandwidth * delay product:
Your RcvWindow limits you to: 700.8 kbps (87.6 KBytes/s) @ 200ms
Your RcvWindow limits you to: 280.32 kbps (35.04 KBytes/s) @ 500ms
Consider increasing your RWIN value to optimize TCP/IP for broadband.

MTU Discovery (RFC1191) = ON

Time to live left = 115 hops
TTL value is ok.

Timestamps (RFC1323) = OFF

Selective Acknowledgements (RFC2018) = ON

IP type of service field (RFC1349)= 00000000




6357235 connections tested since 03.10.2001.

Analyzer version: 1.02 - updated 09.20.2002.

Can anyone interpret this for me? Seems impressive tho

 

I would bet money that nobody has a faster connection than I do

Your download speed : 3869195 bps, or 3869 kbps.
A 472.3 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 7348438 bps, or 7348 kbps

 

ZoneAlarm is the worst thing you can get, it's "alright" for a dial-up connection but for constant get a real firewall (I'm guessing you aren't gonna spend the time to set up an OBSD box) get something from Symantec althought I still disaprove highly of software firewalls it's better than ZoneAlarm, truly a real firewall is an OBSD box with patches and one service, OSSH for a shell for me


You might want to check for how random your SEQ/ACK numbers are by using nmap (Windows is generally lower than OBSD tho ).

 

Do me a favour before getting carried away, Please read all of this.Keep reading until you understand.Follow the instructions to the letter.

http://forums.speedguide.net/showthread.php?threadid=73799

 

Trust me I have my reason to hate ZA, for one, it doesn't stop scans, you can set a special SRC/DST port (I believe it's 53 (domain) but I dont remember, I can look up the articles), true, keeping up with patches is good but patches are slow and many aren't applied (*cough* slapper *cough*). New vulnerabilities are released daily (subscribe to buqtraq) and many of them wont be patched for a while....

 

Re: Cable......

Cyberwizard has a good cable optimizing patch also. Get it here: http://cyberwizardpit.net/download1.htm

The (Unlimited Trialware) are the freebies.