My suspicious mind

Yesterday afternoon my internet connection was dreadful, so slow as to be virtually unusable. The signal strength was on around 4 bars, fair. This went on afor about 4 hours.

During the evening I managed to get onto a broadband comparison site and run a speed test. This revealed download speeds of between 1 and 6. Pathetic, seeing as YakYak should be giving me about 14.

The surprising thing, though, is that as soon as I began running tests and doing a few desultory comparisons, the problem seemed to fix itself, and everything is now back to normal. Just checked and the download speed is still a derisory 5.27, and signal strength is still poor.

Any explanations? Will I be getting a call from YakYak in the next few days with an interestimg offer with an 18 month contract?

 

Was Windows doing one of its updates at that time? Sometimes its difficult to notice as the icon is in the system tray, and if you have more than a couple or so, it doesn't show at all unless you click the little up arrow thing.

Also could be all sorts of other things. Phone line issues, your ISP sending an update to your router, one of your neighbours switching something on that conflicts with the radio band of your wifi forcing your router to have to re-scan for an available channel, but that last one would only affect you if you're using wifi.

 

... or a Zombie mailing half the world and using your PC and Internet connection as its stamping ground :(

 

Possible, but unlikely because of course the machine will have been nicely locked down at its firewall, and its antimalware software will be up to date, and Madahlia wont have been accidentally downloading any nasty trojans from dodgy websites

 

Every time I shut down, I get the message "processing update 1 of 1" which seems to take quite a few minutes? . It has been doing this for the last few days but I have a strong signal when logged on,
Jenny

 

Hmm, well, my laptop's firewall has been unswitch-onable since last May when I did have a nasty virus issue, which GC members kindly guided me through until I got rid of it, leaving only that small problem. The bf downloaded some sort of a replacement firewall though, which hea said would be OK. He is a computer engineer so I believed him.

No obvious sign of updates, they usually get done when the machine's first switched on every day.y

 

If Microsoft spot a security hole, they usually roll it out as soon as its available, so the regularly updates might happen on schedule, but 'emergency' security patches can happen at any time, unless you've explicitly disabled the feature which most people don't (and I can't even remember where the option is now).

A third party firewall will be fine, but I'd be worried about why the built in one wont switch on. That suggests to me that whatever virus you had before may have tampered with either your registry or other core files, which would cause me some concern as that's a trick that virus writers use to disable protection and open up ways into your machine.

Your router will also have its own firewall. You can get to it via a url that is a local IP, something like http://192.168.0.1 but it I can't remember the exact usual default (it starts 192 and usual ends 0.1 but I can't remember for sure the second number @Kristen might remember)

In there, if you pretty much only use normal internet stuff, then you can lock it down to only allow HTTP on port 80 and HTTPS on port 143 (I think), then any dodgy software trying to use non-standard protocols or ports will be blocked before they even reach your laptop.

 

Of course! Silly me for even thinking it

Sorry, I'm a software bod ... I tune out when information like that flies around. I ought to take notes really ...

httpS is port 443