[gangster]

anybody have any experience with these utilities that fine tune your internet settings to improve performance? i have cable.

since i retired i have to be more money concious so am wondering if i could cut back my cable service but "improve" things a bit afterwards.

thanks.

[Apfhex]

Well, optimizing your internet settings won't make your connection faster. If you drop cable to go with, say, a slower DSL connection, it's just going to be slower. I don't believe these "internet optimizers" make a discernible different anyway.

But perhaps I misunderstand, perhaps you're talking about internet "accelerators" like some dialup ISPs like NetZero offer. I've used this type of software before from a local ISP on a 56k dialup connection, and here's what I found: it disables some ads, I believe it also disables Flash, it lowers the quality of images in web pages (with a variable quality setting), and uses some sort of cache system. I didn't like it because graphical content is pretty important on the web these days and didn't bring enough of a speed boost to be worth it.

[wataru]

He's probably talking about software that alters buffer sizes and whatnot to be better suited to broadband speeds. These kinds of things can make small differences, but frankly I don't think it's worth the bother.