Slow Surfing Speeds?

google toolbar slowing down general surfing?

[Ariel Manxie]

I had a quick scan in this section to see if this had been posted about before, apologies if it has already been done to death... (oh yeah and I've been a long time reader of this site but never had reason to post a question before as they are always answered already! ;-) )

Ok I had been having awful problems at work with terribly slow surfing speeds after I had clicked on a couple of links, by the time I had clicked on 4 or 5 links the browser window was effectively dead and I had to shut them down completely and reopen another browser session. The other day my PC got swapped out for a much newer, higher specced one, and the problem remained exactly the same.

The support guy told me the next morning, it was your google toolbar, it was the only thing that was common between your old pc and new one so it has to be... I was like "no" hehe, no way it could been that... but as he had uninstalled it I gave him the benefit of the doubt and sure enough it sorted it out completely.

Out of interest I turned it off at home too and what I had thought was network congestion, wasn't at all.... my surfing speeds at home are now significantly quicker.

I'm in the UK and had been using the full version of the google toolbar and obviously found it really useful and am missing it, but not the dog slow speed :)))

anyone got any bright ideas? or of course I am hoping that Google read this and may be able to improve things for people in the UK (I guess it probably isnt the same issue in the US?)

looking forward to hearing what you all think :)

Regards,
Ariel xxx

[edit_g]

I've got both the google toolbar and alexa and I've never experienced any major slowdown - once in a while the alexa bar will be slow to load - but that's it.

I shouldn't think that the toolbar would slow things down - it's a bit like saying that the back button on the browser is slowing things down - it's just a piece of GUI.

[Ariel Manxie]

i'm not being funny but it IS slowing my surfing down significantly! I'm not hugely technical but what about the sending back to Google of info that the advanced version does?... are you in the US edit_g?

[edit_g]

Nope - I'm in sunny old London.

I'm not sure about what it sends back to Google - but it would be small packet stuff - 5 or 10k strings of referrers and numbers I guess. If you have the Google compute feature enabled this may make a difference - although I thought it only used idle pcs - I've never tired it.

I'm sure there is someone more techy who can answer this better.