Making your connection the best it can be

Here are some tips to making your connection to CSS Internet Services the best it can be. The tips could help you get a better connection and stay connected longer. If you get disconnected while online or get what you feel are connections slower than you think your modem/system should deliver, this is the place to look.

• Rural Customers

  If you live in a rural area, or are quite some distance from a BellSouth switch, you will not be able to get the highest speed connections. In one example, I live in town and have a friend with the same computer and modem as me who lives less than 2 miles outside of town. I can get 46,666 (sometimes even 53,333) connections regularly while he gets 26,600 at best. The only resolution for this situation is an ISDN line which gives you digital 64k connections everytime.

• Weather

  Could weather be the culprit? If your connection is fine in fair weather, but poor in moist weather, you may need to have your wiring checked out. The wiring between bell and the internet server is digital and constantly monitored for quality. The line between your home and the phone company is designed for voice communication and is not up to the quality of our T1 PRI line. Moisture in the box outside your house or in other places between your home and bell could cause disconnections and/or poor connections during less than fair weather. If you think this could be your problem, have the phone company test your lines during wet weather to be sure. Hundreds of other customers connect without problems during all types of weather, you can too.

• Reboot

  Reboot your computer and try again. Sometimes your computer resources are allocated by programs you run and are never freed up properly. A fresh reboot will clear this up. If you have an internal modem, cycle your computers power when you get the safe to shut down message. If you modem is external, cycle its power when rebooting. This will clear up most error conditions that are caused by bad modem settings.

• Modem Driver

  Your modem driver should be the most current available for your brand of modem. Check the documents that came with your computer or modem for the internet address of your modem manufacturor. Go to their site and see if any updates/patches are available for your modem. Also, if you are using a modem with X2 technology see Making X2 Work.

• Browser Version

  Make sure you are running version 3 of either NetScape or Internet Explorer. If not, download a newer version from those sites or from our own server on the Browser Page.

• Phone Line

  The phone line should run from your computer/modem directly to the wall jack. It shouldn't be "chained" off a fax machine, answering machine, or other phone line devices. Also, the cheap surge protecters you get at wal-mart introduce noise into your line. This noise interferes with the highest speed connections. Decide if you would rather risk the spike that you may get for the increase speed and reliability of your internet connection. Also, see the section above on weather.
  We have mostly fiber optic lines from BellSouth, but it is possible, however rare, for one of those lines to have problems. We constantly run tests for these problem and report them to Bell promptly.

• Memory

  Make sure you have at least 16 Meg of RAM for Windows 95. Also, don't run other programs in other windows while on the internet. Leave all your memory for your browser and dialup connection.

• Hard Drive Space

  Allot lots of room for your browser's cache. This keeps information readily available that doesn't change from day to day. An example is the graphic on the Lauderdale County Home Page. It doesn't change, so there is no need to reload it each time you visit the page. Make sure your hard drive isn't near capacity - keep at least 100MB free space at all times. Also, sometimes clearing your cache may aid future performance. To do this click VIEW, OPTIONS, ADVANCED, SETTINGS, EMPTY FOLDER. And/or, VIEW, OPTIONS, NAVIGATION, CLEAR HISTORY. The first time you visit each site will be slow as all images must be loaded from scratch, but clearing the cache makes room for current items and has been know to clear up some hang ups on certain sites.

More drastic measures to find the problem are listed below

• Test your computer somewhere else

  Take your computer to a friends house and connect though his/her phone line. Some homes may have poor wiring that causes noise in the line. This may be noise you can't hear with a hand set. If your connection is good there, the problem is in your home wiring.

• Test someone else's computer at your house

  Your modem/computer may just have a problem the above steps can't fix. Use your friends computer on your phone lines and see how it works. If your friend's computer works this way, the problem is in your computer.

• Bring your computer in

  Bring your computer to a local computer store and have it checked out. These places can fix your computer or tell you what you need to do to make your computer work better.

• Consideration

  Occasional even the best computer and the best connection will occasionally get a bad connection. This, however rare, is part of our high speed connection age.

Money can make things all better

• Purchase an ISDN modem and get an ISDN internet account
• Add more RAM memory
• Add a larger hard drive
• Replace your computer with that new 800Mhz Pentium-III with 256MEG RAM