The performance of my (admittedly old - PIII 500 running Win98) computer has slowly got worse and worse over the past month or two (and I mean bad - the mouse pointer taking ages to move, webpages taking 2-3 seconds to render after loading), and one reason, I’ve found is NTL’s Broadband Medic software, which manages my connection.
When I got broadband from NTL originally, the program to handle connecting was called CorrectConnect, and did its job fine. But a couple of months ago it insisted on downloading a new program. It’s about a hundred times slower (takes an age to load up every time I need to do anything with it like reset the connection) and sits in memory doing absolutely nothing, as far as I can tell. I’ve found that shutting it down (and a background process called Motivesb, which you have to stop using Ctrl-Alt-Del) after it’s started the connection causes no ill effect whatsoever. But I’m still wondering - “Why take a neat, speedy piece of software and replace it with something hideously slow that doesn’t do anything extra?”
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July 19th, 2004 at 01:13:01
While i realise this will not suit everyone, when installing the cable modem with Windows XP (home) it is quite possible to simply ignore NTL’s crap AOL like software, and let windows install the modem as a nameless cable connection. To do this simply exit the program that starts when you insert the CD, and let Windows install the modem as a new hardware piece. This does require a little knowhow, but if you have used Windows for a few years it should be fairly simple. I would like to add that Window’s own USB plug and play software (from XP onwards) is quite good, and i (a 19 yr old student with no Computing qualifications) was able to install the modem in about 10 minutes flat.