mr. flea was on the phone with our DSL tech support last night for an hour and got no love. We seek a solution, or even plain insight, into the following problem:

We have DSL. It works fine, except our upload and dowload speeds are about 1/10 those promised by the company. Upload speed is 17Kbps; download more like 160Kbps. These speeds are consisten for things like - downloading iTunes, uploading photos to Ofoto, moving documents to and from mr. flea's work computer. Thing is, when the DSL tech support had mr. flea do their special speed tests last night, he got great speeds. On their special speed test sites. He still got crap speeds on the stuff he actually uses.

Secondarily, can people who have Wifi tell if you are stealing it? Because we could just steal it from the frat boys next year and save $30 a month.

So I'm going to install a new motherboard at the weekend. Any hints or tips? Any hidden pitfalls to watch out for?

Make sure the screws aren't touching the case. Use those screw thingies that lift the board off the case if you can, otherwise use the rubber circles under your screws. Make sure your MB supports your processor and RAM before installing. Be prepared that you may have to reinstall your OS to go with your new MB.

Secondarily, can people who have Wifi tell if you are stealing it? Because we could just steal it from the frat boys next year and save $30 a month.

Somebody posted an article about this over the weekend, here or in Natter. I think if the lights on their router blink madly when they're not using the internet it's a tip-off.

Thanks for that, Wolfram - it was here, and I found it. Since 7 guys live in the house, the lights on their router are probably blinking all the damn time anyway.

Down side is, they'll move out in May. But the new ones will probably have Wifi too...

I need to try Firefox, to see why it's making a dent, and Opera never really did.

do you like tabbed browsers? if so, i recommend Slimbrowser. i had issues with Firefox, so my IT guy told me to try SB. i love it. it doesn't do that annoying blinking thing while the pages load.

The integration of various search engines ALONE is cool ass shit.

Opera has a fair amount of integration -- I can search from a box in the address bar, or I can type "g 'colin farrell'" instead of a URL to google him (or "i 'colin farrell'" to do an image search -- and I can add other search engines too). I can also highlight text on a page, right click, and send the highlighted text to a number of search engines. How does Firefox work.

The find feature absolutely rocked my wurld!

Please to elaborate?

do you like tabbed browsers?

Opera is a tabbed browser.

ita, I think Firefox works similarly. There is a little search bar to the right of the address bar and you can do dictionary.com, google, amazon, yahoo, ebay, etc.

The find feature is described above when I yahoo'd about it, but you can find words while typing in the first few letters. It does the google thing and highlights all instances of the word. Which works fantastically after threadsucking.

I never did get into Opera. My main problem with it is that many of the sites I visited didn't load right in Opera.

It does the google thing and highlights all instances of the word.

That is nifty. Opera doesn't have anything like that.

As for compatibility -- Opera won't load gmail, and bankofamerica.com insists that it's too insecure (bullSHIT, but they upped their compatibility testing, so just pretending to be IE isn't enough anymore) -- otherwise everything loads -- well, usably. I wouldn't know if it's prettier in IE or Firefox, now that I think about it.

it doesn't do that annoying blinking thing while the pages load.

Firefox doesn't blink for me.

serial:

The main thing, though, that I adore about Opera is the mouse gestures. Being able to close a window, move onto the next page, move back in history, open a blank page, or move up one level in the directory structure by just wiggling the mouse (no clicking required) is so addictive, and I find myself trying to do it in IE whenever I use it.

Opera is a tabbed browser.

ah. never used it. you'd probably like SB then.

Firefox doesn't blink for me.

it only did it for me on certain sites. lj, beta. places that had a lot of content to load on one page.