When you start analyzing slow broadband connections the initial checks to make involve contacting your ISP to make sure the connection is not faulty. After this, you start looking at how services and applications in your system are using, or misusing, your bandwidth. This post takes a look at how services and applications can be tweaked to improve Internet performance.

Before you start making any alterations it is worthwhile gauging what the current speed of your connection actually is. Use a service like Speedtest.net to get information regarding the upload, download and ping rates. This can then be checked after making changes to see how the performance improvements have gone.

The first tweak to start making is to your browser. Make sure to get the latest updates that will include security updates as well as performance tweaks. Configuration changes to the browser can often help but it is just as easy to use and add-on such as Faster Fox to automate the configuration changes in optimum way.

Next, you have to consider which of your add-ons are really necessary. Ideally you should try and disable all of them initially to see if this helps improve performance. These small applications can use a lot of bandwidth on just about every page you visit.

You should also try testing out different browsers. Some websites will load a lot quicker than a whopper as you have as each will support rendering web technologies in different ways.

You can now look at restricting web access for specific applications on the computer. The main tool for doing this is the firewall. It should have a section relating to permissions where you can block access to the web for specific services. Do not block Windows update or your anti-virus scanning tools from getting updates.

Finally, slow laptop performance speeds can also impact your web connection. Consider defragmenting the hard drive, increasing the virtual memory and checking for viruses to make sure there are no general performance issues.