Sunday, February 5, 2012

Connection problems

I'd been having connection problems for days. Internet pages were slow to load, partially loaded, or would simply not load, downloads were slow, and frequently stalled.
I wondered if I'd changed a setting somewhere or installed something that had broken the internet. I was trying to think what I'd done on the computer a few days previously when the problem started. It seemed to be the computer because my Android phone managed an update of Opera of about 11MB in a few seconds while the computer was off- something that was taking an hour or so on the computer with frequent lost connections.
I was thinking about calling up my ISP to see if there was a problem when I thought I'd better check the physical connections first. What I found was the ADSL filter sitting on top of my laptop power supply. I'd punted it there while doing the hoovering a few days previously, and the EMR from the power supply was obviously interfering with the signal passing through the ADSL filter- explaining why my phone got a good connection when the laptop wasn't working, and why the problem had started a few days earlier.
It only goes to show that it pays to check the wiring before blaming the ISP.

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