Pemanent Apartment Internet Connection

Last week I connected with Arnet broadband service, which is a branch of Telecom, my landline provider. It is my first time to connect at my house in BA.

My computer has never been the same since. Slow, I have to reboot about once per hour, etc. Does anyone have experience with this service or can anyone recommend a better one?

Also can anyone recommend a good and relatively cheap IT "repairman"? I called one out of the yellow pages last week and he had to reinstall my operating system etc. He was here for 5 hours and I think he was clueless.

Thanks,

Moore

[QUOTE=Moore]Last week I connected with Arnet broadband service, which is a branch of Telecom, my landline provider. It is my first time to connect at my house in BA.

My computer has never been the same since. Slow, I have to reboot about once per hour, etc. Does anyone have experience with this service or can anyone recommend a better one?

Also can anyone recommend a good and relatively cheap IT "repairman"? I called one out of the yellow pages last week and he had to reinstall my operating system etc. He was here for 5 hours and I think he was clueless.

Thanks,

Moore[/QUOTE]Is it better now? If so, I'd guess you either picked up a bad case of malware or developed a serious hardware / software problem. If it isn't better after the reinstall, you may have a hardware problem related to the way your computer is connected to the Internet.

Do you have a router installed or are you connected directly to the Internet? A router makes things more complicated but provides important protection by hiding your computer from bad guys scanning the Internet.

Unfortunately, if you have a Windows PC, malware is the most likely source of the problem. Sometimes you can clean malware by repeated use of several different anti-spyware programs (no program seems to get them all) but the only 100% sure solution is to reinstall Windows, install a secure defense, and "surf safely". For me, that means installing the Microsoft Antispyware program (it's free and good) and doing most browing using anything other than Internet Explorer (I use Firefox but there are other choices) Five hours isn't too unreasonable for a complete reinstall depending on the number of problems encountered.

I recommend to people that they have two partitions. Install the OS and applications on a 10GB C: drive and put all data on the D: drive. Move all the "My." folders to a directory on D:. That way they can reformat and reinstall on C: without losing too much data. Something always seems to get lost anyway as programmers like to do stupid things like store important data in the program directory.

The Internet has been a major disaster for the reliability of Windows computers. The easy answer is to get a Mac but that's really just trading one set of problems (malware, reliability) for another (cost, software availability)

Thanks for your response.

There is a router - ADSL SmartAX MT810 USB Router made by Huawei.

I backed up everything before the reinstall of Windows 2000, which wiped my entire computer. The techician installed Office 2000 for me illegally I guess - I had it legally before the wipe but lost the CDs sometime.

I did the reinstall before the technician came. I was accessing the net but had no virus protection as the wipe deleted it. According to him that caused serious problems. That may sound stupid but I know little about computers except surfing the web and using Excel / Word.

The technician installed Windows service paks 3 & 4, the latter of which took several hours to "unpack". He also installed virus protection (AVG) and the spyware. He recommended that I run the Spyware about once / week.

I still need to reboot about once per hour. After 1 hour of use, the internet no longer works. I can see that my connection to broadband is still on, but any addresss will come up blank (page not available) if I try to refresh or reopen.

As you describe the problem, it is almost the same as I had a couple of years ago (that is, MS Internet Explorer collapse after a while, using Win2000) although I was using dialup in BA.

I solved it by reinstalling Win2000, then installing a firewall BEFORE connecting to the Internet to download a new version of MSIExplorer or anything else. While downloading these 16MB or so, I experienced no less than 30 attempts for disrupting the MSIE download.

You can download a free firewall at Tucows or similar.

As of ASDL connections, I recommend to contract the ASDL service related to the telephone company (that is, Speedy if you have Telefónica or Arnet if you have Telecom) so that you can avoid the excuses of "call your telephone (Internet provider) company because the problem is on their side", calling alternatively these companies until they discourage you by playing that game on and on.

Hope this helps,

Andres

Moore,

My advice it's installing Windows XP (the legal one) and back up your files on a periodic basis. XP contains a restoring very easy to use interfase.

If not, just find the way for reinstalling everything by just inserting a couple of CD's so your computer will works always as a brand new PC.

I've used to own a compaq presario laptop with a wonderful CD "restore CD", so everytime I've felt the computer started to run slower. Fuck everything and brand new laptop I had. (first you should backup your files) I surf very unsafe all the time, I receive attacks, viruses, etc, but I don't care.

I've used to manage a cybercafe (one the first in BA) and surfers treated PC's very bad, so we've developed a HD Image, I think that now should be better software for that. You can save configurations and some files on your HD image. A good source for finding more experienced technicians on PC's as computer parts the right place is galerias jardin (Florida between lavalle and tucuman)

In my experience, 90% of technicians does not understand anyting about anything. And it's always best if you can solve your problems by yourself.

Regards