The top 10 tips and tricks to boost your internet speed.
Your internet connectivity is more than just the bandwidth provided by your ISP. It's
impacted by your network adapters, wireless router settings, browser, hard drive, operating system,
and a host of other items. Here are the top 10 tips and tricks to boost your internet speed
right from your computer. First, get a benchmark of your current speed before making any of these
changes. Open your favorite browser and go to speedtest.net. Click GO and let it run through
the speed test. Capture the final numbers for your download, upload, and ping results.
It's more accurate to run this a few times to get an average. Now let's improve your internet speed.
#1 DNS Settings. Every website you see on the internet is translated from a name into an IP
address so your browser can find it. This is handled by a Domain Name System or DNS. If you
open a command prompt and type PING GOOGLE.COM you can see that it translates the google name
into this IP address. All these IP addresses are contained in a big database that is shared around
the internet by DNS servers and the time it takes to look up a name on these servers and return the
address can dramatically affect your internet speed. Your ISP generally provides you with
their own DNS server and you can see what that is by typing IPCONFIG /ALL. Here you see the primary
and secondary DNS servers. One of the best ways to boost your internet speed is to choose a faster
DNS server. According to dnsperf.com which rates DNS speed the fastest public DNS in the world
right now is 1.1.1.1 and you can use it in place of your slow DNS settings given to you by your
ISP. To change the DNS settings on your computer come down here to the taskbar and right-click on
your network connection. Open Network and Internet Settings and you'll see your ethernet connection
here or wi-fi if that's what you're using. Come down here to Change Adapter Options, right-click
on the one that you just saw, and go to Properties and click on Internet Protocol Version 4 and go
to Properties. Here Use the Following DNS Servers and punch in those numbers by hand.
Hit OK and close that window. It's now updated your network to that DNS server.
Now, it is better if you update these settings in your router or whatever other device you're
using to connect to the internet because that will dole out that DNS settings to all of the devices
on your network but this will work as well if you want to just do it for this computer. Reboot and
you should be good to go. #2 Wi-Fi Analyzer. If you are using a wi-fi connection you can improve
speed by analyzing your wi-fi signal and set the communication through the most efficient channel.
A useful tool to help determine the best wi-fi channel is Wi-Fi Analyzer. It's available from
the Microsoft Store. Come down here to the Search, type in store, and bring up the Microsoft Store.
In the Search look for the app called wi-fi analyzer and select it from the menu.
Go ahead and do the install and then click launch. When you're ready this should come up
with your network information. If it doesn't it's probably because you're not connected through a
wi-fi connection because that's required. Come over to the Analyze menu and you'll see all of
the different channels available for hotspot communication on wi-fi with the one for yours.
Down here you'll see the recommendation of which channel you should be on for the most efficient
communication and it will change over time depending on the activity going on around you.
If you come down here to View you can turn on the SSID and see the names of
all of these different hotspots nearby. Now, I'm showing the 2.4 gigahertz connection right here
but you can change this to 5 gigahertz if that's what your wi-fi connection is running on
and you'll see those items as well. The key with this is you want to select a channel that's
recommended that would be the most efficient for communication for your wi-fi and you'll need to
find where to change this in your router and, in my case, there's an option right here to change
the wi-fi channel to whatever number I want or leave it auto but just be aware by making
these slight adjustments you'll see improvements in speed by using the correct wi-fi channel. #3
Update Network Drivers. The software drivers you have installed for your network adapters can also
have an impact on the performance of your internet connection so let's come down here and right-click
and open the Network and Internet Settings. I'm going to click on Change Adapter Options
and I'm going to select the one that I have in use right now which is this Ethernet 2. Right-click,
go to Properties, and click Configure. If you go to the Driver tab you can see the date
and version for the driver you have in use and you can see that this one I'm currently using
is installed by Microsoft. I can update the driver directly and search for it
but that oftentimes doesn't find the latest one from the manufacturer so let's do a search for
the Realtek PCI driver directly from the web. So I'm going to open up an internet browser.
I'm going to search for that driver and it looks like this one right here. In the list
you can see that it's got different drivers for different versions of Windows.
I'm going to select the one that I want for Windows 10. This wants your email address
and I'm going to open that file. We're going to extract it
and in this case we just need to run the setup.exe.
I'm going to go ahead and do a repair and you can see the new version that's being installed is 10
and we'll finish that.
Now when I look at the driver it's updated to the latest date and the version is changed as
well. With a simple reboot you'll be running on the new network adapter driver software.
Now, you may want to do the same thing for any other adapters that you have installed as well
just to make sure they're all updated to the latest versions. It's always a good idea to
stay with the current and correct driver to get the best speed out of your internet connection.
#4 TCP Optimizer. Another great tool is TCP Optimizer 4 which helps you
optimize the settings on your network adapter. Open a browser and go to speedguide.net
and click on this TCP Optimizer button and download the latest version.
Now click and find that folder file, right-click, and run it as administrator.
Change the settings down here to Optimal and make sure to slide this bar all the way to the
right for 100Mb connection speed. You can also check the other network adapters that you have
and do the same thing or check this box and it'll do all the network adapters at once.
When you're done apply the changes and you can see the old values and new values and hit OK.
It'll prompt to do a reboot but you can wait and do that at any point.
Just remember you can go back to the windows defaults and apply those changes if you want
to revert back to the old settings. You'll also see that it created a backup copy of
your original settings. When you're ready go ahead and reboot your computer and you'll have the most
optimal settings for internet speed. #5 Delivery Optimization. Recent versions of Windows 10 has
an interesting new feature called Delivery Optimization. You can find it by going down
to the search and typing it in. Select Delivery Optimization Settings from the menu and it opens
up this window. You can see right here it says if you turn this on your pc may send parts of
previously downloaded windows updates and apps to pcs on your local network or on the internet.
What this means is you're sending data from your computer through your internet connection to other
computers on the internet and that's going to use bandwidth for your internet connection.
So I recommend turning this off. Go to the Advanced Options, scroll down here, and you'll see
that there's an option here as well where you can limit how much bandwidth is used for uploading.
So we're going to turn both of these check boxes on and slide these all the way to the bottom to
minimize the amount of data that are uploaded to other computers on the internet. If you don't have
the ability to turn on these settings or to adjust the sliding bar it's probably because the Group
Policy setting in your company is controlling these settings so you'll have to talk to your
admin because they may be intentionally using your computer bandwidth to update to other computers.
If it's just you in your home network then it makes no sense to feed your data to other
people on the internet and use your bandwidth so turn this setting off. #6 Clear Browsing Data.
Your favorite internet browser might be causing slowness with your internet connection as well.
Come down here to Microsoft Edge, for example. Click on Settings and go to Privacy, Search,
and Services. Scroll down here and you have an option to clear your browsing data.
Select Choose What to Clear and you can see that there's all kinds of browsing history,
download history, cookies, cached images, and a variety of other things stored.
You can select the amount of time frame that you want to clear this data so I'm going to leave it
on All Time. By clearing this it's going to free up all of that stored data which can surprisingly
slow down your browser's functionality and make your internet connection appear a lot slower.
For Chrome you'll find this under Settings, Privacy and Security, Clear Browsing Data
and you have the same option to choose All Time and to clear your browsing history, and cookies,
and other data. So I recommend you do this in any browser you're using for internet access
to help clear that space and make it run more efficiently. #7 Router Firmware. Your router
can impair your internet speed if you don't have the latest firmware updates installed.
As manufacturers find bugs and improve performance with their software they post updates that can be
installed on these devices. For example, my router has an option to manually flash the firmware
in the menu and you can use a file downloaded from the manufacturer's website. It also has an option
to do a Remote Update directly and shows that a new version is available for install. If you have
never done a firmware update or it has been a very long time you could be missing out on dramatic
improvements to the performance of your router and as a result improvements to your internet speed.
#8 Flush DNS. Even though the DNS settings we changed earlier can improve the time to look up IP
addresses on the internet, Windows also stores the DNS entries for sites you've visited in the past.
This data is stored locally and it's good to clear this data out on occasion. You can flush the DNS
by going to a command prompt, type IPCONFIG /FLUSHDNS, and hit Enter. That's all it takes.
#9 Use SSD. When you browse the internet passwords, history logs, cookies, cached images,
and other data is recorded on your local hard drive and the disk I/O can have a significant
impact to the speed of your browser as you navigate from one page to the next.
It is especially true if you have a slow hard drive like what many older computers contain.
A solid-state drive can make a huge difference. Consider upgrading your older computer to SSD.
It not only improves the performance of Windows 10 but can improve the performance of your internet
browsing as well. #10 Call Your ISP. The final suggestion to boost your internet speed may be the
easiest of all. Call your ISP and complain about the slow internet speed. You may be surprised.
Many ISPs throttle data to balance bandwidth usage between their many customers or have increased
bandwidth in your area but have not adjusted your settings to give you access to it yet.
By simply calling them and asking you may find that you can boost your internet speed
significantly without paying extra. That's the top 10 tips and tricks to boost your internet speed.
Now go to speedtest.net and see if you have an increase from your earlier benchmark.
If you do please take a moment right now to post a comment in the description below this video
and let everyone know how much of a boost you got. I hope these tips and tricks work for you.
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