Here's a quick tip to speed up your browsing - -

If you have Internet Explorer 6 do the following...

Open the browser > Tools > Internet Options > "Settings" button > Change the figure in the box to 55-80mb > press ok then ok again and that's it !!

That figure is the size of your Temporary Internet cache and XP tends to set that figure REALLY high, like 1-2GB !! There is no need for it to be big...55-80mb is perfectly ok.

For Firefox...

Tools > Options > Privacy > Cache

Then set it to whatever you wish.

I recommend against this advice if you are using a Lite High Speed service or a dial up connection. The reason for this is that the internet cache will store information that you've recently accessed on the internet. If you have the hard drive space then you will greatly appreciate when you access a page you were at yesterday and it doesn't take forever to load like last time since it's already on your hard drive.

For Lite High Speed users the cache is also useful sice a lot of those services have an up/download cap that will either incur additional charges per gigabyte or will slow you're internet down to a crawl for the rest of the month or your billing period. The internet cache will reduce your total download and upload amount and help stretch those precious Gigabytes a little further.

Of course if you're on an uncapped Cable or DSL connection make the cache walk the plank and sail away!

More tweaks:

If you visit a web page with lots of images (and supporting files like CSS styles and Javascript), then you can have a slower browsing experience. On average, your browser has to make more than 40 requests to the server before it can assemble the complete page. Requesting all the files you need two-at-a-time is going to be slower than requesting 10 files at a time, for example.

You can speed up Internet Explorer by tweaking hidden registry values, thereby enabling your browser to get more files in fewer chunks.

Step 1. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SoftwareMicrosoft\Windows\Curren tVersion\Internet Settings.

Step 2. Create a new DWORD key (in 64-bit Vista create a "DWORD (32-bit) value"), called MaxConnectionsPerServer

Step 3. Modify this key and set the base Decimal value greater than 2 (I use 10 to 15).

Step 4. Create a new DWORD key called MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server.

Step 5. Modify this key and set the base Decimal value the same as MaxConnectionsPerServer.

Step 6. Exit Registry Editor and reboot your computer.

If you ever want to undo this tweak, simply delete the two keys you made and reboot.

[OC]ModShop - Speed up Internet Explorer

Another Firefox tweak:

In address bar type: about:config

In filter type: pipe

Change the following values (double click them to change them)

network.http.pipelining - true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests - 30
network.http.proxy.pipelining - true

Right click > Select New > Integer
type: nglayout.initialpaint.delay - set the value to 0

For Firefox Cache, go Tools> Options> Advanced> Then select the Network tab.


What cache setting for Firefox do you recommend? Mine is currently on 78.8 MB