Windows 7 Your Way: Speed Up Internet (First Time on Net Part2)

Speeding Up the Internet

Customizing Internet Explorer is one way to have the Internet your way in Windows 7(also Vista), but it’s just part of the picture. The other way to optimize the Internet on your system is to speed up your browsing— by whatever means possible!.Following is the continue of the part1.

6Browsing Faster with an Alternate DNS Service

Let’s move beyond the browser to consider your actual connection to the Internet—which affects every browser, not just Internet Explorer. Even the fastest broadband connection can feel slow if it takes a long time to pull up each website you want to visit. This problem is due to something called the Domain Name System (DNS) and slowness in your ISP’s DNS server—and can be corrected.

•     What Is a DNS Server—And How Does It Affect Connection Speed?

Every website is hosted on a web server, which is a fancy type of computer connected to the Internet. To identify the millions of such servers, each server has its own unique address, called an IP address, which looks something like this: 192.111.222.333. Of course, you don’t type this address into your web browser when you want to visit a website. What you type is the URL or website address, which looks something like this: www.websiteaddress.com. The URL, then, is an alias for the site’s true address. What a DNS server does is link the site’s easy-to-remember web address with its hard-to-remember IP address. For example, www.google.com is the URL for the server located at the 209.85.153.104 IP address. When you enter the URL www.google.com in your web browser, that domain request is sent to a DNS server that looks up that IP address and then routes the request to the server located at 209.85.153.104. (You can test this by entering the IP address directly into your browser; it should take you directly to the associated website.) When you connect to the Internet via your Internet service provider (ISP), your URL requests are sent to that ISP’s DNS server. That’s a simple enough process—until your ISP’s DNS server starts to get bogged down. When that happens, it takes longer for the DNS server to look up the IP addresses for the URLs you enter. Unfortunately, many ISP DNS servers are notoriously slow. The result is that it takes longer to load any web page you want to visit. It’s not the connection that’s slow, it’s the ability of your ISP to look up the web pages you want to view.

•      Choosing a Third-Party DNS Service

You can work around this issue by directing your URL requests to a different DNS server. To that end, several sites offer alternative DNS services, promising faster lookups and thus faster web browsing.

To use a third-party DNS service, you have to configure your web browser to route your URL requests to the new server. We’ll get to that in a moment. First, let’s look at the two most popular DNS services today, DNS Advantage and OpenDNS. Table 1 provides the detail, including the information you’ll need to reconfigure Windows for these services. Both of these services are free, although you may have to subscribe to gain full access.

   Configuring Your System for an Alternate DNS Service

To use an alternate DNS service, you have to reconfigure Windows to send all domain requests to the new DNS server.

This is a network-related procedure, and here’s how it works:

1. Open the Control Panel and select Network and Sharing Center.

2. When the Network and Sharing Center opens, click Change Adapter Settings.

3. When the Network Connections window opens, right-click the icon for your connection and select Properties.

4. When the Properties dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 6, make sure the Networking tab is selected.

5. Select Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) from the list and click the Properties button.

FIGURE 6 Editing Windows 7’s Internet Protocol settings.

6. When the next Properties dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 7, select the Use the Following DNS Server Addresses option.

7. Enter the DNS service’s preferred DNS server address into the Preferred DNS Server box.

8. Enter the DNS service’s alternate DNS server address into the Alternate DNS Server box.

9. Click OK.

With Windows thus reconfigured, you’ll now access the third-party DNS server whenever you’re web browsing—which should be slightly faster than what you’re used to with your ISP’s DNS server.

FIGURE 15.7 Entering new DNS server addresses.

7 Increasing the Size of Your DNS Cache

Still on the subject of DNS lookup, Windows stores your most recently visited website addresses in a special DNS cache on your hard drive. (Not to be confused with your temporary Internet cache…) Your web browser accesses this cache of known addresses before it goes out to the Internet to send a URL request to an external DNS server. If the web address you’re looking for is in the cache, it gets used by your browser, saving valuable browsing time. You can speed up your browsing by increasing the size of this DNS cache. A bigger DNS cache enables addresses for more websites to be stored locally, which means fewer external DNS lookups. To increase the size of your computer’s DNS cache, you have to edit the Windows Registry, which is the large database where all the configuration settings for your system are stored. You edit the Registry using the Registry Editor utility.

Here’s what you need to do: note

1. Open the Start menu, enter regedit into the search box, and then press Enter.

2. When the Registry Editor, opens, as shown in Figure 8, navigate to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\ Services\Dnscache\Parameters key.

3. Select Edit, New, DWORD (32-bit) Value.

4. Name this new item CacheHashTableBucketSize.

5. Right-click this new item and select Modify.

6. In the Value Data dialog box, change the value to 1.

7. Select Edit, New, DWORD (32-bit) Value.

8. Name this new item CacheHashTableSize.

9. Right-click this new item and select Modify.

10. In the Value Data dialog box, change the value to 180.

11. Select Edit, New, DWORD (32-bit) Value.

12. Name this new item MaxCacheEntryTtlLimit.

13. Right-click this new item and select Modify.

14. In the Value Data dialog box, change the value to ff00. Note, these are zeroes.

15. Select Edit, New, DWORD (32-bit) Value. 16. Name this new item MaxSOACacheEntryTtlLimit.

17. Right-click this new item and select Modify.

18. In the Value Data dialog box, change the value to 12d.

For these changes to take effect, you need to close the Registry Editor and restart Windows.

You should notice a slight speedup when next you browse the Web.

Warning: Take care when editing the Registry. All changes you make are immediately enabled; any mistakes you make can affect the running of your system.

8Enabling More Simultaneous Connections

With another little Registry tweak that can speed up web browsing for many users. This tweak has to do with how many files you can download at the same time from a web server. By default, Internet Explorer 8 is configured to enable six simultaneous connections to a server. The problem comes when you visit a web page that contains lots of images and JavaScript content, all of which have to download to your browser. With just a half-dozen simultaneous connections enabled, it can take awhile to download multiple images and such. Here are the facts. Your browser has to make more than 40 requests to the server before it can assemble a typical web page. Requesting all those files a half-dozen at a time is going to take longer than requesting ten (or more) files at a time. If you can download more connections, you can significantly speed up the display of all web pages.

To enable more simultaneous connections from a single web server, you have to edit the Windows Registry, using the Registry Editor. Here’s how to enable ten simultaneous connections to a server:

1. Open the Start menu, enter regedit into the search box, and then press Enter.

2. When the Registry Editor, opens, navigate to the HKEY_CURRENT_ USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings key.(Shown In figure9)

3. Select Edit, New, DWORD (32-bit) Value.

4. Name this new item MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server.

5. Right-click this new item and select Modify.

6. In the Value Data dialog box, change the value to 10.

7. Click OK.

8. Select Edit, New, DWORD (32-bit) Value.

9. Name this new item MaxConnectionsPerServer.

10. Right-click this new item and select Modify.

11. In the Value Data dialog box, change the value to 10.

12. Click OK. 13. Close the Registry Editor. When you edit the Registry Editor, close Internet Explorer.

When you restart your browser, the new value will be in effect—and your web browsing should be a little speedier!

9Conclusion: 

You thought web browsing was simple, didn’t you? It’s surprising to many users to discover all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes while you’re browsing your favorite web pages. Simplify this behind-the-scenes stuff, and your browsing may get a little faster—which is yet another way to have Windows 7 and the Internet your way.