Broadband Woes

Blogging has been particularly light since I got my broadband installed. I had a period of two or three days where I just could not get my new connection to work. It turned out that the modem didn't like my old USB 1 ports but a Belkin USB 2.0 card sorted that out. Since then I've had a few niggling problems- with webpages that just won't load. There are one or two that I just can't access at all- and a few that come and go. One day I'll be able to get the page up, the next I won't. None are particularly important but today BlackFive won't work for me. And I'm beginning to think that my connection should be a little quicker than it actually is. Maybe.

It's pretty frustrating (actually it's infuriating). I did all the usual things- uninstall and reinstall the modem, clear cookies, cache, temporary files. Nothing helps. And by the way, if you're looking to clear up your PC check out a program called CleanUp! Just be careful what check boxes are ticked because this program does a good job. Despite clearing the cache of Firefox and IE, and then downloading a history eraser program, CleanUp was able to delete nearly 700Mb of files from my PC- the majority of them from IE. That blasted program puts temporary files and cookies all over the place!

I've also spent a good deal of time checking my system out for viruses and spyware, thinking that might be part of the problem. Spybot and Ad-Aware don't get everything- check out Panda's free online spyware checker too. It took a long time on my machine which was a bit of a pain- I had to clear a few things up and then re-run it to make sure everything was still copacetic. Even though my system is free of infection I'm still having this problem with pages that won't load. The weird thing is that I can still access them via my dial up modem- so it looks like it's not a problem with my software. Right? My ISP has not been particularly helpful but they did assure me that the pages aren't blocked in any way- and a friend with the same ISP can access them without any bother.

All in all it's consumed an aeful lot of time to check my PC out and I'm still no closer to discovering the solution. I'm left thinking that it's the broadband modem- it seems to be the only link in the chain that I haven't touched yet. It's a USB modem and while that's something I'm not that keen on, it was free when I signed up with my ISP. I think I'll have to scrounge up an internal modem and check out the connection with that.

Hopefully I'll be able to stumble across some sort of solution and get back to normal shortly. My problem is that I can't let go of a problem until it's fixed. If you've any ideas of other solutions I haven't tried yet, please do leave a comment.