Speeding up your Internet
Speeding up your Internet (and enabling YouTube access in Turkey)
Several people have come to me asking why their internet access is so slow. A similar number of people have asked "how do I access YouTube from Turkey". So this issue I take a look at a simple way to solve both problems.
There are many, many reasons why your access is slow; whether it's software related; from virus scanners, malware scanners, and firewalls, through to hardware problems; mis-configured modems, or perhaps just a bad connection or an over-loaded service provider. There's no silver bullet, and usually improvements are slow, but I've found that 9 times out of 10, the solution below offers a notable improvement, both in terms of speed, but also reliability and security.
When you type in a web address, e.g. www.bbc.co.uk, your computer talks to your ISP (e.g. TTNet), and converts the web address into numbers (e.g. 212.58.253.68), only once this translation has been done can you start to download the page. Most ISPs - especially TTNet - are relatively slow at doing this. OpenDNS is quicker, and also offers; protection against Phishing and Malware, type correction, and caching, web filtering. Oh, and it lets you access YouTube!
Setting up your computer to use OpenDNS is simple and free, and it works on any PC or Mac. Helpfully OpenDNS have some good guides on how to configure your computer, click the links to configure your system:
- Windows:
- Apple:
Once you have made the changes, go to http://www.opendns.com/welcome/ and check to see if it worked...
If you have any problems just let us know and I'll be happy to help you with the setup.