freckles_and_doubt | gaaargh! I want to eat your brains!

Nope, this isn't the result of way too much Scary Go Round; more accurately, I want to pick your brains if you're of the techno-geek persuasion. (Mmmm, tasty).

See, this I-Burst thing about which I have recently been swearing creatively. In the last few weeks my attempts at web browsing (Firefox) have been dogged by the unhappy tendency for pages to refuse to load: i.e. the little loading icon flashes briefly, then stops, the bottom of the screen says "Done", and absolutely nothing is on the page. Reloading the page gets the same result often up to 20 times before something takes and the damned thing actually loads. Sometimes (particularly with LJ) it loads a shattered version without all the proper formatting. It also tends to load image-heavy pages like Go Fug Yourself without the actual images, although reloading five or six times may cause a random selection of the images to appear. Eventually. The problem is not as acute with downloading e-mail (Thunderbird), but occasionally it can't find the SMTP or POP servers.

I thought that this was the result of the Iburst's lousy signal and wildly swinging signal strength. However! Exactly the same thing happens if I'm on dial-up rather than the Iburst.

Just to add to the randomness and frustration, sometimes rebooting the computer seems to help, although that could simply be about coincidental swings in the Iburst signal.

So, my question to you is, if this isn't actually about the Iburst signal, what could my Evil Landlord possibly have done to create this problem when installing the Iburst? (Which is installed on his computer, btw, which is networked to mine). Settings changed? strange sigils chalked under the hard drive? 10m of network cable randomly passing through mini wormholes in the fabric of reality? deliberate sabotage? It doesn't happen to his computer. Mutter.

I fling myself on your collective mercies, because asking the EL about it is causing him to say, "Hmm, odd, mine doesn't do that" and wander off to play more Rise of Legends.

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P doesn't wab like normal people while at work, so I'll only get to pass this query on to him this evening. I have high hopes of him being able to answer usefully, though. Now me, my speciality is integral calculus.

Your husband is really quite terrifyingly conscientious. Thanks, I'd appreciate his input. I'm sorry the problem isn't more interesting for you :>.

P says he can look at your computer settings on his way home on Thursday, if you'd like that. If he could combine that activity with picking up some wax that the EL is expecting him to fetch, that would be convenient. So, he suggests you wrest said wax from the EL (as he might not be home yet when P comes around) and a computer skills-wax swap can be made. Sound like a plan?

Coolness! sounds great, thanks. Will extract wax from the Evil Landlord pronto, even though that sounds quite disgusting...

Stuff is not loading. The broken formatting is likely to be caused by CSS files not loading (or tables not being loaded completely), and the broken pictures (obviously) are caused by pictures not loading. What is causing this is hard to say -- it could be happening on both dialup and iburst because both connections are crappy, but if it is not happening on EL's computer at the same time as it's happening on yours, this may indicate a software problem on your computer. If it's full of spyware, the spyware could be transferring data in the background, leeching bandwidth away from your legitimate surfing efforts (and possibly running a spam gateway, or something equally horrible).

I re-iterate my standing offer to install Linux. ;) Otherwise, there are tools you can install to look for spyware and nuke it; hopefully someone who uses Windows can recommend something. Here's a random page; it looks like a reputable source: http://www.bu.edu/pcsc/spyware/

You should also check your firewall settings (to shut down all paths in and out of your computer that you aren't using, which is likely to be the vast majority). The page above links to some information about that as well.

hopefully someone who uses Windows can recommend something
The first three: Ad-Aware, Windows Defender and Spybot should probably be tried.

I use Spybot and it has served me well.

Also, a question: does the interweb abominate in the same way if you use Internet Explorer? Not that I am advocating IE, but if it works ok then you may have a problem with Firefox.

Weirdly enough, I was having the exact same issue, on both Firefox and IE, on Friday. It seems to have mostly cleared itself up (I hope!!!).

Hmmm. Installed Spybot, did a sweep. Removed precisely one piece of spyware. Connectivity is better this morning, but it's still doing the non-load thing occasionally. It may well have been part of the problem. You clever person, you!

Ok,
1.) It's happening on your PC and not on EL's.
2.) Both Firefox and IE ?
3.) Dialup and Iburst, so it's not DNS server settings?

Also, the connection settings in firefox match those on the EL's PC?

You should be able to look at your connection icon when connected via dialup to see if there is activity. There should be none when the web pages are busy timing out. If there plenty, spyware!

Very good point. If the bytes are flowing but the pages are timing out, you might have what is known in the trade as a bad case of "ownz0red spam zombie"-itis.

If no bytes are flowing, it's probably a misconfiguration. Or a broken cable. Never underestimate the simple stuff.

Hmmm. I did accidentally pinch the network cable in the study door the other night. Have I broken Teh Internet??

gaaargh! I want to eat your brains!

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teh Interweb

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