taking forever to open web pages

themissingdigit

over the last few months our service from aol has really gone down hill with disconection happening a lot & not being able to get on at all. but now we have a lot of problems opening web pages, sometimes taking 30 seconds or more.
is this down to aol? would it improve by changing provider? we have been with them a long time & rely on our email addresses so would like to avoid this if possible.
we are on aol silver which is 2mbps speed. i have done online checks & we exceed this.
our pc is windows xp pro, 250gb hard drive, 1024 mb sdram.

thanks paul

marleyboy

It does sound like your ISP, but it is possible you have some application running in the background that is slowing it down, a good way to check if its your firewall is to try opening pages whilst holding down "ctrl", and see if they open anymore rapidly, if they do, its more likely a script conflict with the site and the firewall. Good luck

tom9980

Some antivirus software can cause this sometimes AVG 8.0 has been a problem for some people in a similar way of late since its release so maybe disabling this for a short time to test might be worthwhile.

Which broswer are you using? Aol, ie, opera or firefox?

http://www.speedtest.net/ - do a speedtest both when things are fine and when its slow are the results very different?

themissingdigit

thanks to both, we will give both a crack. usually use AOL but sometime use firefox.