How to easily speed up your BSNL BroadBand Connection

just found this article which discusses 3 important tips to significantly speed up your internet access through BSNL Dataone broadband connection / most other BroadBand connections like Reliance or Tata Indicom or Sify Broadband .

Tip 1: One of the major problems with BSNL Dataone Broadband connection is the DNS servers they provide by default. Most of the time they are very slow and sometimes they fail to respond. I noticed that I am starting to spend a significant amount of time in DNS resolution with Dataone connection, often it is larger than the time it takes to actually get the reponse. Here is a simple solution to significantly speed up your DNS resolution.

Open up the network connection profile and edit TCP/IP settings. In the DNS server address fields, specify the following DNS server addresses: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220
Disconnect the connection and then connect again. You are done.

This specifies third party DNS servers which are significantly faster than BSNL Dataone’s DNS servers.

Note: The service is provided by OpenDNS.

Tip 2: Firefox users can use FlashBlock extension to prevent downloading of Flash content by default, thereby significantly speeding up browsing experience. You can click on the placeholder icon to display the original Flash content any time. This is more of a passive tip in that reduces data usage to improve your overall experience.

Tip 3: You can try to increase your broadband bandwidth tweaking the TCP/IP parameters. The process is simplified by using TCPOptimizer, a free tool. It helped me a lot but your mileage may vary.

Also, there's nice little tweak for XP. Microsoft reserve 20% of your available bandwidth for their own purposes. This also affects your Broadband peformance. You can get back this 20% as follows:

Click Start-->Run-->type "gpedit.msc" without the "
This opens the group policy editor. Then go to:
Local Computer Policy-->Computer Configuration-->Administrative Templates-->Network-->QOS Packet Scheduler-->
Limit Reservable Bandwidth
Double click on Limit Reservable bandwidth. It will say it is not configured, but the truth is under the 'Explain' tab :

"By default, the Packet Scheduler limits the system to 20 percent of the bandwidth of a connection, but you can use this
setting to override the default."
So the trick is to ENABLE reservable bandwidth, then set it to ZERO.
This will allow the system to reserve nothing, rather than the default 20%.

I have tested the above procedure on Windows 2000 , XP Pro , XP SP-1 & XP SP-2 only. But not tested other o/s.
Awaiting for feedback about your results too!

How to easily Speed Up your Firefox in 4 Simple Steps

Many of you have been asking me how to increase their browsing speeds with BSNL , MTNL, Airtel, Tata Indicom, Reliance , Sify , etc Broadband connections. As usual I have a trick up my sleeves to increase the speed your Firefox performance.

The below steps will hold good only if you have a Broadband connection - else it will make your browsing much slower. Let's now have a look at the simple 4 steps.

First of all Type “about:config” into the address bar in Firefox and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries and make the necessary changes.

You will need to enable Pipelining in Firefox. Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several request at once, which will substantially speed up your page loading times.

Alter the entries as follows:
1. Change “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
2. Change “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
3. Also, change “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to a number like 40. This in turn means that Firefox will make 40 requests at once.
4. Finally right-click anywhere in Firefox and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives - so we ask it not to wait even a second!!

You’ll now see that the webpages in Firefox load MUCH faster now!

Now you can easily Configure Outlook 2007 to access Gmail using IMAP

If you'd like to access your Gmail Account from a mail client like Outlook 2007 and not from the gmail website then you have some news to cheerish on - Google has finally implemented IMAP support in Gmail! So you can now easily control the messages in your gmail account straight from your desktop.

For those of you who don't know what IMAP is all about - IMAP actually stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. It creates a permanent connection between your computer and the Mail Server (your Gmail account). The main advantage is that every time you delete a message using your client it is also automatically removed from the web server (Your Gmail account). The other cool thing is that you can use most of the Gmail features such as 'Report as spam' and even 'Star' special messages straight from Outlook (or other email client) with all the actions getting automatically applied on your account.

The list of Clients that Gmail's IMAP is compatible with are:

• Outlook Express (on Windows)
• Outlook 2003 (on Windows)
• Outlook 2007 (on Windows)
• Apple Mail
• Windows Mail
• Thunderbird 2.0

To check whether the IMAP function was already implemented into your account or not, login using your username and password, click on 'Settings' and go over to 'Forwarding and POP/IMAP'. In case the IMAP function is not already there for you, the tab is named only 'Forwarding and POP'.

To enable IMAP in your Gmail account:

1. Log in to your Gmail account.
2. Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page.
3. Click Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
4. Select Enable IMAP.
5. Click Save Changes.