Question: storing digital images

Might be good to run a wireless speedtest, then hook a network cable directly to the router and laptop and run a wired test.

http://www.speedtest.n​et/

I am only 200 up and down, but things are pretty quick for me.

OhLook, try running a program called 'resmon' short for Resource Monitor. (Type 'resmon' into the search area). There is a section called "Network" and it shows you all the programs (or apps) using your internet network. Many things download that you probably know nothing about. An example of this is OfficeClickToRun which is impossible to switch off and takes up some resources every day. That's just an example and is only used by later version of Microsoft Office. Also, have you switched off Windows updates? If not, they will take hours at your speeds. You can switch them off by a setting your connection as metered (I can give you precise instructions if you need to do this).

Let me know how you get on.

Capn Jack wrote in post #18777740
You have your WiFi protected? I'm sure you do, but I should ask. By "protected", I mean with a password so someone can't connect to your WiFi without your permission?
Can you connect via a network connection and see if speeds improve?

I have the same issue here, where certain sites are also slow, and that is with the cheap 300 Mbps connection I have. You really can't fix how other sites load as they are out of your control. They often wait for their paid advertisers to load before showing the content you want. CNN is a bit slow to load video for me as well.

Yes, there's a password. Connecting without WiFi? Uhh, I don't know.

If your connection is 300 Mbps and you call it cheap, and mine is 0.9 Mbps, then mine should be free. Indeed, I should get paid for using it. Are the decimals in the right places?

I understand that loading speed won't be optimal, because we didn't buy the fastest DSL available. Still, the speed has declined recently.

AnnieMacD wrote in post #18777742
OhLook, try running a program called 'resmon' short for Resource Monitor. . . .

Thanks, but it doesn't seem to apply to Macs. My husband and I each have one. Nothing else is on the network.

Ah, sorry, I didn't realize you were on a Mac. Can't help you there I'm afraid.

OhLook wrote in post #18777774
Yes, there's a password. Connecting without WiFi? Uhh, I don't know.

If your connection is 300 Mbps and you call it cheap, and mine is 0.9 Mbps, then mine should be free. Indeed, I should get paid for using it. Are the decimals in the right places?

I understand that loading speed won't be optimal, because we didn't buy the fastest DSL available. Still, the speed has declined recently.

Thanks, but it doesn't seem to apply to Macs. My husband and I each have one. Nothing else is on the network.

OhLook- I'm out of ideas, I'm sorry. It seems your speeds are in the expected range for DSL

Ironic, isn't it, that Nebraska has such internet compared to the tech-heavy SF Bay area. The edge of the city is rather abrupt. The "expensive connection" is 1,000 Mbps. We have fiber-optic to our house. We were limited to 25 Mbps for the "expensive" option until the local cable TV company got enough people annoyed that even the city council let some competition in.

When you run the speed test it is very important that you report the results correctly. There are two options for reporting speed, and the only difference in how they look is the capitalisation of the abbreviation. You have Megabits per second Mbps and you have MegaBytes per second MBps, or possibly Mb/s and MB/s. The difference is that you get between eight and ten times more Megabits than you do MegaBytes per second for any specific connection. This is because there are eight bits in a Byte of memory, plus you may have some extra overheads in how the data is actually encoded for transmission over the network. The speeds that you are showing would be far more appropriate for MB/s than for Mb/s as you have been writing.

Most ISP's will use the Mb/s numbers since they are much larger, always good for an advertising headline. 0.9MB/s is actually a very good speed for your average run of the mill 8 to 10 Mb/s connection. For most people upload speeds are not so important, that really only affects gamers and those doing things like Youtube live streaming. Are the numbers that you have given the claimed speed for your package from the ISP, or the results of running an online speed test? If they are the result of running a test, and the results are actually MB/s then your connection is probably fine. If those results really are Mb/s then at 0.9Mb/s you would seem to have a very slow connection, at least when compared to the sorts of average speeds we get here in the UK. 0.9Mb/s would not be considered fast enough for reliable download streaming from Youtube or Netflix.

Alan

BigAl007 wrote in post #18777965
Are the numbers that you have given the claimed speed for your package from the ISP, or the results of running an online speed test? If they are the result of running a test, and the results are actually MB/s then your connection is probably fine. If those results really are Mb/s then at 0.9Mb/s you would seem to have a very slow connection, at least when compared to the sorts of average speeds we get here in the UK.

The results are from an online speed test, and the unit was Mbps. I went there again to make sure.

Oh, do you have a smartphone with hotspot connection facilities?

rrblint wrote in post #18778016
Oh, do you have a smartphone with hotspot connection facilities?

Nope.

Okay, it was just a thought. I had speeds similar to yours on DSL. I switched to using my phone as a hotspot. I get about 45 Mb/s which is 50 times faster and it's cheaper too.

0.9Mb/s is a little lower than average for DSL. Emphasis on 'little'. Maximum is 1.5Mb/s.

Distance from the exchange is a major limiting factor. Even if the exchange is next door bad quality line and network bottle necks can still limit speeds.
ADSL2+ would average 10 times your speed download, maybe a bit more but only similar speed upload.

OhLook wrote in post #18777554
I'm asking whether having too many data-heavy items (i.e., images) burdens the computer so that it can't download videos as fast as news sites try to deliver them. Download speeds seem to have slowed for other material as well, although I don't have figures to support this.

May just be an urban myth but I was under the impression that the desktop was treated differently to normal folders and that having lots of actual files there slowed performance. Shouldn't be too hard to do a quick test by moving it and replacing with shortcuts/aliases.

Also system files can become corrupted over time. I have had a couple of instances of my system or software slowing. After trying uninstall/reinstalls and system tweaks it came down to corrupted of missing system files. A reinstall of the OS worked a treat (though it is a pain in the bum to do).

OhLook wrote in post #18777247
Thank you, BigAl. The files are JPGs. I tried the compression maneuver (making a zip file). It didn't save much space at all, and getting into the folder was a chore, as the capn predicted.

My purpose wasn't to reduce noise, it was to free memory. Downloading has got slow. Videos at cnn.com pause several times within a minute, although long YouTube videos play straight through. I don't know what's slowing things up.

OhLook wrote in post #18777504
So overloading the Desktop doesn't strain available RAM? An unnamed person–well, okay, the one I'm married to–said moving the folders might help.

The speed test yielded these numbers:
PING 73 ms
JITTER 1 ms
DOWNLOAD 0.9 Mbps
UPLOAD 0.7 Mbps

I'm too frugal to keep programs active when not in use. The main photo folder I'm concerned about is currently "only" 1.33 Gb because the photos are JPGs.

OhLook wrote in post #18777774
Yes, there's a password. Connecting without WiFi? Uhh, I don't know.

If your connection is 300 Mbps and you call it cheap, and mine is 0.9 Mbps, then mine should be free. Indeed, I should get paid for using it. Are the decimals in the right places?

I understand that loading speed won't be optimal, because we didn't buy the fastest DSL available. Still, the speed has declined recently.

Thanks, but it doesn't seem to apply to Macs. My husband and I each have one. Nothing else is on the network.

Your internet connection is woefully inadequate for what you are trying to do.

It may have been faster in the past, but often as more housing goes up, the internet companies don't upgrade their hubs to handle the traffic, so everyone's speed eventually drops. More houses, at some point, means more fiber that has to be run. I suspect there is a bottleneck somewhere. You could run a ping test (trace route) to various sites too to see where latency lies.

It doesn't sound like it is the computer at this point. A good minimum for Youtube videos is 3Mbps, and you are below that. Might be worth contacting your service provider. In the past we moved to a faster speed based on a promotion Frontier issued. My speeds went slower than what I had before but my advertised speed was twice. I ran a series of speed tests, etc and opened a ticket. Turns out they had heard of others getting slower performance on the faster plan, and I had to have them convert us back to the slower plan.

It worked out because we then received a discount due to the drop in speed, and the bill was less than when it was before they converted us. I would see what plan they have you on, and then run a speed test connected directly to the router, and see if it is below the speeds they are charging you for. I know people at Frontier, I used to work with them, and they count on consumers not complaining when speeds drop, it saves them money to not have to run additional fiber, or send folks out and splice in spare fiber that already exists to their switches.

Choderboy wrote in post #18778044
Distance from the exchange is a major limiting factor.

Yes. I don't know where the exchange is, not that I could nudge it closer anyway.

Dan Marchant wrote in post #18778062
May just be an urban myth but I was under the impression that the desktop was treated differently to normal folders and that having lots of actual files there slowed performance.

That's what my husband said. Others disagree.

john crossley wrote in post #18778075
Your internet connection is woefully inadequate for what you are trying to do.

Well, the slowness is only an annoyance so far. The greatest effect is on the major regional "newspaper" here. It recently added more advertising and made changes in format. The whole thing loads slowly. Some pages don't open at all. There are little videos, analogous to sidebars, that always display as errors instead of playing.

Yesterday I took notes on a CNN video, 1:34 long. It paused briefly at 0:09, 1:10, and 1:19. Fortunately, most CNN videos aren't ones I care about.

TeamSpeed wrote in post #18778129
It may have been faster in the past, but often as more housing goes up, the internet companies don't upgrade their hubs to handle the traffic, so everyone's speed eventually drops. More houses, at some point, means more fiber that has to be run.

Increasing density near public transit has become official policy, never mind the effects on people who already live here. There isn't spare land for more houses. Taller apartment buildings are going up.

My connection comes through copper wire, not fiber. Does an increase in customers within, say, a square mile still slow it?

You know how to do these things.