The day slow internet almost ruined my movie plans

Imagine this: You are sitting in front of your computer and booking tickets for the movie that you have been waiting all summer to watch. How frustrating would it be if the page took ages to load and you ultimately did not get to book your ticket because the session had timed out? This recently happened to me and I was really angry! I had volunteered to book tickets for a movie that my friends and I wanted to watch. I had just registered on to this new website, which claimed hassle free booking of movie tickets. And I was looking forward to using their services. After I punched in my credit card details, I kept on waiting for the website to direct me to the confirmation page, however that never happened! All I got was an error message saying the page could not be displayed and that I needed to check my internet connection. Wow! Now that I had not expected! It was a double blow, I would have to sit home on the weekend and I would get charged for a movie that I would never get to see!

Not ready for a gloomy weekend, I immediately started damage control and spent half an hour requesting my credit card company to reverse the charges! Well somehow I managed to accomplish that.  I then asked another friend to book tickets and I was quite surprised when she could book it in an instant. I was surprised because, for starters, both of us have the same make of laptop, the same ISP, and we used the same site for booking tickets, then how was she able to book the tickets when I wasn’t? Now I could not blame the website for the problem. So I called up the customer care center of the ISP and I was told that there was no fault at their end. My surprise was now giving way to panic! It was taking ages for a simple website to load! The internet connection was slow. There had to be something that was causing this fault.  I tried the age old method: switched the modem off and then switched it on, thinking that this would cure the slow internet issue, but nothing changed.

Well like always help was at hand, my friends walked in and I decided to ask them for a solution. According to them the browsing speed could be slow because of variety of reasons. The presence of malware, adware and spyware could decrease the browsing speed. A problem at the ISP end could delay transfer of information. Even too many temporary internet files and cookies could hinder the browsing speed.

Well out of the three problems. I was sure that my computer did not have any viruses (I had just scanned my PC) and that the internet connection was working just fine. So the problem would have to be with presence of too many temporary internet files in the cache! Anyone can remove temporary internet files, even I could! Actually, all that I did was double click on ‘Internet Options’ in the control panel, after which in the ‘General’ tab I clicked on Delete Files under Temporary Internet Files. When the Delete Files dialog box opened, I selected Delete all offline content and clicked OK. The files were deleted! Imagine that, in just four steps, I deleted files and got my internet working at high speed again!

I love such do-it-yourself solutions for computer problems! But honestly, I could not have done it without help from my friends! I shudder to think of a day when I get some strange problem which none of my friends can solve. Wonder what I’ll do then…

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