Computers: OH! The aggravation of it all

OH! The aggravation of it all

Written by Vern Anderson

Have you ever had one of those days when you just felt like chucking your computer out repparttar

window and forgetting you ever owned it.**

Today was another one for me. It seems they are coming more frequently.**

First: cannot connect to isp. Getting repparttar 107900 message, repparttar 107901 computer you are dialing cannot be found. Funny it was there when I shut down last nite.**

Shut repparttar 107902 computer down and re-start, finally it hooks up. Oh no none of my sites are working today. Seems my web host has problems also.**

Fired off email to web host, but they are not even receiving email. Oh my God, what if they went belly up.**

I have all my sites with one web host to get better pricing. Problem is if they are having problems all my sites are down.**

What if someone clicks on one of my ads and my site doesn't come up? What will repparttar 107903 think of me, will they ever click on one of my ads again?**

Speeds Explained

Written by Richard Lowe

So how fast is your internet connection anyway? Yeah, I know that many companies now (especially DSL - for more information see http://www.internet-tips.net/System/DSL.htm, and cable) are advertising speeds of upwards of a megabit or more. Well, what does that really mean? And how fast is 56K or 28.8 anyway?

I know this is hard to believe if you're relatively new to repparttar world of computers or repparttar 107899 internet, but back in 1978 modems were running at 110 or 300 bits per second (the technical term is baud). The table below is not precisely accurate but gives a rough idea of how repparttar 107900 speeds have been working their way upwards for repparttar 107901 past few years.

Speed Timeline

1978 100 to 300 baud 1988 1200 to 2400 baud 1993 14,400 baud 1995 28,800 baud 1997 33,000 baud 1998 56,000 baud 1999 1,500,000 baud DSL and cable mode connections

In comparison, local network connections run at 10,000,000 bits per second at least and it is becoming more common for these to be running at 100 million bits per second.

But what does all this mean? Well, a character is eight bits (a bit is a zero or a one, and it takes 8 of them to make a single character). The letter K means 1,024, so a 28K modem is 1,024 times 28 or 28,672 bits per second (also called bps).

Now divide repparttar 107902 28,672 by 8 and you have repparttar 107903 maximum number of characters per second that your modem can run at. This works out to 3,584 characters per second, which in today's world is considered pretty slow (you will understand why shortly).

Interesting fact: Modem speeds are all standardized by International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The ITU defines 28.8K bps modems as v.32 and 33.6K bps modems as v.34.

All right, now you are getting 3.5 thousand characters per second, if you have a 28K modem, right? Well, not exactly. First off, repparttar 107904 quality of your phone line may drop that down significantly. What happens is your computer sends some data to repparttar 107905 "internet"; it is received but there was an error, so repparttar 107906 internet computer requests that repparttar 107907 data be resent. The worse repparttar 107908 quality (you can hear how bad it is by repparttar 107909 amount of static you can hear when you listen on repparttar 107910 line) repparttar 107911 more times repparttar 107912 data has to be resent, repparttar 107913 slower repparttar 107914 line.

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