Speed up Browsing

Use OpenDNS to Speed Up Internet Browsing

Have you ever wondered How Domain Name works, and what is domain name ? The name of Website such as Google.com or itechntips.com is called domain name. Now next question is when you put a domain name into your Web Browsers address bar how does it know where is this site located and it opens the correct site ?

So here is answer to your question –

When we type a site address or domain name (itechntips.com)  in our web browsers address bar, The Web browser or our computer find IP address of the computer which is having this site. This is called Domain Name resolving. Now once the Web browser know the exact IP address of computer or web server having pages requested it connect to that computer and download the web page, images etc and show you in your web browser.

All Operating systems uses a DNS (Domain Name Server) to find out IP address of the server having web pages you requested. By default your ISP or Network administrator configures your computer to use their DNS Server. These DNS server may be slow and also takes some time to update. If the site requested by you is not available with DNS server specified it looks for address in Other DNS server and then fetches the web page you requested. This process can take a lot of time and you will feel a slow browsing speed.

You can increase performance of your internet browsing by using more efficient and fast DNS server of your choice.  As Each site you want to visit must be resolved to it’s IP address, the Speed of browsing depends on performance of your DNS server.  Sometime it takes even few second before your computer resolve the Address of Site you requested to see.

OpenDNS  (opendns.com) provides free access to there DNS servers. Anyone on the internet can use their servers and they are very fast and reliable as well. In last 2 years of my experience with them I don’t remember a single instance when DNS server provided by OpenDNS went down. However it happened several times with my ISP’s DNS servers. Using OpenDNS Servers will increase your browsing speed by reducing time taken to resolve your site address or URL to IP address.

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Tips To Speed Up Your Windows XP – Part 1

Well you have a quite Old Windows XP system and you worried about the speed of your system. It seems that your computer is getting Slow day by day.. Now you are tired of slow speed and thinking to upgrade just because your PC is running slow compared to what it was when you bought it new. But before deciding to upgrade the hardware try following things and it may restore the speed of your good old PC to it’s original state and you will not need to spend your hard earned money in upgrading the PC.

1. Defragment Your disk

The first thing which slow down the Computer is Disk Fragmentation.  Files get fragmented as computer deletes and adds new files and Hard disk takes more time in searching and displaying fragmented files then files located in adjacent places. To speed up file search time you need to defrag your hard disk. You should run your defragmenter at least once a month the best option is to schedule the defragmentation task for a convenient time so that you don’t have to worry about it. even though if you are not comfortable with scheduled task then here is the process to do it manually —

  • Click  Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter.
  • Select the drives you want to defrag (important is OS drive or usually C:) and click on Button named Analyze.
  • Once analysis is complete Click defrag.
  • Click Defragment

Defragmentation process is quite time taking and can run for hours depending on how much fragments your hard disk have. Also even though Windows defragmenter is good enough but for more optimum performance we recommend using some third party software like O&O Disk Defragmenter.

windows-disk-check-utility2. Detect and Repair Disk Errors

Over the time because of intensive disk operation, and improper shut downs disk may develop some structure error or Bad sectors. These kind of error occupy disk space or report improper disk usage to OS and can lead to slow performance. Sometime it even refuse to write data. To repair such error Windows has a build in tool called Check disk or Disk checker. It searches entire hard disk for several commonly known problems and rectify the or mark the bad sector as well. If possible it also recovers data from Bad sector and relocates that to other position of Hard disk. To run Disk Checker follow the steps given below –

  • Click Start > Select My Computer.
  • From My Computer right-click on the hard disk drive you want to scan and select Properties.
  • Choose the Tools tab
  • Click on the button Check Now
  • Select the Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors check box and click Start.

This will now automatically check the hard disk and repair it wherever possible. also if it finds any error which can;t be repaired bu tool it will inform you and will save the same in an error log which you can use for later use.

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