my computer is a dell 531s dual core,2gigram and 250 gig hard drive. i use hughs network sattilite enternet. the last 3 to 4 days it has been slow on and off the net. i have performed the basics, including defrag. i am at a lost.

roger miller, April 2008

Contact Hughes support. Satellite communications are vulnerable to all sorts of interference also they might have changed the satelitte you are using. If you are trying to use VPN it is very very slow and Hughes will not support it.

John D, April 2008

Defragmenting the hard drive will usually increase the speed of a hard drive by roughly 10- 15 %. In this case I would say it is more likely that you have spyware, a worm or a virus . If you have no antivirus installed try downloading AVG antivirus from WWW.grisoft.com . ( THey have a free version on this site for home users) Scan the pc and see if it comes up with anything. Also Download Spybot Search & Destroy ( this too is free although donations are accepted, just google it ). This software will scan your pc for spyware. Also Microsoft have a malicious software tool ( also free , just google it ). In general the more recent the operating system the more RAM you should have, for example Vista Home basic uses a minimum of 512 MB RAM, so the more RAM you have a on a computer the better!!

mick, April 2008

Is the PC it's self slow? ie, how is it with performing locally based tasks?
Or
Is the internet the actual problem?
I would run a DSl Speed test (Google the phrase).

Redders, April 2008

Run an anti-virus scan and anti-spyware

t, April 2008