pages not loading, slow broadband

lexi

i hope conor you read this, looks like we need your help again! ok, my brother has sony vaio laptop. he was having broadband problems with toucan, who suggested getting a modem - he did & bought a netgear one. after receiving excellent advice from conor, we managed to get him on secured network broadband with netgear. everything was ok for 5 weeks until monday. since then when he tries to bring any webpage up, it says webpage temporarily unavailable. i know this is common, however he needs to refresh around 5 times to get the page loaded happening on most webpages. he says on rare occasions it does load immediately. it also seems slow. in his own words its weird. i said perhaps there are some connection issues & as it was bank holiday maybe the net was very busy! not good advice but i am no i.t. technician! however this is now a week old so that theory is blown away. any ideas? i wonder if something is trying to load as well as the webpage in the background.

DatabaseError

has he tried rebooting (unplugging for a few seconds) the modem/router? often an easy fix for many net problems, maybe just the central pipe he is connected to is a bit full, and a reboot/resync will fix it, not the most elegant solution, but it may work.
Just to pull you up on one point (nicely), "as it was bank holiday maybe the net was very busy!" the bank holiday is a uk thing, the internet is global, 24/7, if you are finding the internet slows down at 'peak' times, this is not 'the internet going slow', it is your ISP failing to supply the bandwidth required to service customer numbers, most commonly experienced by those with *cough* 'value' providers.

free4440273

check the PPP indicator on your modem: is it on? if not, this could point to a problem with your bb supplier (rather than being indicative of a problem on your side).