Has anyone tried Onspeed? 12 April 2005 at 10:39AM edited 30 November -1 at 12:00AM in Broadband & Internet Access 82 replies 67.5K views

andy88_2

It may be useful even in conjunction with broadband on a bandwidth-capped service

mssjab

I have Onspeed installed on one computer and, being one of Tiscali's customers, their Accelerator software on another.

I can't find any difference in performance between the two. The big bonus is that Onspeed charge £25 for a one year licence whereas the Tiscali version is free to download, and use.

robbiemack

I have been using onspeed for almost a year now it does speed up your connection the only hiccup is if the settings are too fast any pictures you download degrade in quality.However that shouldnt put you of trying it.I have it on-top of my broadband to give me some extra kick when surfing.

DebbieO_3

:mad: It drove me and my husband mad coz it messed up our computer, luckily we cancelled within 7days due to the problems,No it didnt seem to make our dial up any better, but thank goodness for broadband.I would not recommend onspeed.

Annie_the_grannie

Hi I have recived a disk from tiscali telling me they now offer all their customers free compression software sounds just the same as on speed, I haven't tried it yet but you can download from their site if you are a customer. I give it ago when I have a bit of time and let you know
Annie

MartinDrew

scurrier wrote:

I've been using OnSpeed for a few months now, and in conjunction with Flexi-Surf ISP at £5 for 60 hours per month, and using either Opera or Firefox browsers, I get pretty good response on normal web pages.
The biggest difference is the quality of non-text.
At full speed, picture quality is poor, but there are six speed settings that you can adjust at any time, to improve the quality but slow the speed.
Security pages (https) are not loaded via OnSpeed so they are at original speed and quality.
However, I do have a couple of quibbles.
Firstly, sometimes OnSpeed doesn't function properly and I may have to disconnect and re-dial my ISP or even re-boot my PC, but this doesn't happen very often.
""Secondly, if a web page is loaded at full speed and it contains a picture that I would like to be of better quality, I haven't found a way of achieving this. If I reset the speed setting to "original" and reload the page, the quality doesn't improve. I've tried deleting the page from my Web Page History, but this doesn't seem to work either.
Anybody know if there is a way around this?""

With regards to reloading pages with pictures that you want to see I've had similar problems, the way around I've found is not to delete from the history but to navigate yourself to your internet CACHE file and delete the pages from there - then click on reload "after setting Onspeed to the desired setting" and it works perfectly every time.


Onspeed is essentially a great tool for those times when one is not bothered about the quality of pictures being downloaded. Another way around it is to set your browser to block pictures anyway (I use avantbrowser which has an easily accesible button on a toolbar to utilise this function). I have also recently acquired a new bluetooth modem which is allowing me to connect to my dial-up ISP at consistent speeds of 115kps which is noticably faster with Onspeed off and even better when Onspeed is turned on again.

One more comment about Onspeed in my experience...turn it off before trying to perform a live update with any Norton product as the downloads either take forever or they fail potentially leaving you unknowingly inadequately protected.

Happy Surfing Dudes :-)

digp

onspeed is in fact a rather inferior product vis-a-vis propel (at propel.com)

PS BT Yahoo Anytime customers get a 1 year free sub to onspeed

Arandorastar

I've installed the recently released PocketPC version on my Ipaq 2210 PDA which I connect to the internet through Bluetooth and my Sony mobile when away from home. It's obviously better and cheaper to speed up this access as it is even slower than normal dial-up. Onspeed noticibly improves the speed of browsing (perhaps not as much as I hoped) but when switchd on I cannot access my Email Inbox in Pocket Outlook. I have to switch off OnSpeed which rather defeats the bject if there are any attachments I want to download. Contacted OnSpeed via the on-line real time help line but the lass quickly got out of her depth but got a senior techie to phone me, which was great service. He said he would simulate my problem and phon me back by Monday at the latest. I'm still waiting. Not so great service!

mbspuk

I've looked at Onspeed and I'm not impressed, especially not when you consider the price you can get broadband for these days.

If your anything like me and value your privacy you'll want to read their privacy clauses too.

An interesting article on Onspeed can be found here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,,1127808,00.html

mike_paterson

This might be useful for 56k dial-up, but as I have posted before in other threads, it is an absolute waste of money for anybody with broadband. In a lot of cases it was actually slower that not having it. Most delays in surfing are down to latency (delay) and queuing at servers serving the data, or in the internet network itself so any spped improvements are actually negligible in real life, particularly if you are downloading or viewing files which are generally compressed as far as possible anyway.

Tip - If you need fast surfing and do not need to see pictures and video, then (in Internet Explorer) go to Tools - Internet Options - Advanced and then scroll down to the multimedia section. You can then uncheck the boxes that allow displaying of pictures and video.

Cheers
Mike