As new member/poster on this forum I want to thank Model Railroader for providing this great place to share ideas, learn and offer hard advise.
I do however, have a question/comment regarding user friendliness of the site.
First some background:
1)) I’m active on a few other MRR forums, as well as this one.
2)) I am most often on during morning (0900 to 1100) or “late” night hours (often at midnight or later).
3)) I’m rural with a telephone hook-up with my ISP which most often operates at around 26 kbps (which I realize is slow…).
I am not usually one to complain, but this forum seems terribly slow to me…The slowest I’m involved with. As an example, just a few day ago, a topic I was interested in viewing took 9 minutes to load and had only had 17 replies! Granted, that may have been the slowest that evening, but it always seems slow!
In comparison, the two other forums I frequent take well less than a minute to load from topic to topic, sometimes only seconds, even with as many as 50 replies.
My question: Is the speed of moving from topic to topic on this forum affected by the photos/graphics always attached to a reply?
My comment: If the photos/graphics are the reason…Are they necessary? Sometimes I see the same photo three of four times on a thread, because of the back and forth. The back and forth is the great part, making for some great discussion, but if the same photo being posted over and over and over…is what is giving me enough time to make sandwiches and coffee in between topics, it’s frustrating!
Just a thought…And an opinion.
You can speed-up the download by modifing your profile/options. Select TEXT ONLY and NO images. This should help for those posts that include a lot of large pictures, etc.
There has been some discussion about the size of some photos in our signatures, I don’t know how many have tried to reduce the size of thier pics but I did. So if your still having problems you may have to look deeper. I have also upgraded my connection to satelite because I’m so far in the woods. By the way Satelite is about 10 to 20X faster.
I too at one time felt this forum was a bit slow, even with my DSL connect.
THEN along came my Dell Dimension(2.8 GHz). This made the difference
from a slow freight to the high speed Acela.
colvinbackshop,
I believe you are correct that all the graphics and pictures cause your pages to load slowly.
You can set your priorities for text only, but you miss some great pictures that way. You could buy a faster, more expensive computer, but with dial-up, it won’t help much. Subscribing to satellite or changing your ISP may be the best way to eliminate your problem.
Not a great selection of solutions. Sorry 'bout that, Chief.
Darrell, sorry and quiet…for now
and in the famous words of a computer geek…it’s not the speed of the website…it’s the speed of the server you use…another thing that could make your comp slow is that your computer is loaded with too much spyware…get a copy of “ad-aware” and run it…it may be whats slowing your computer down …quarantine all the add on stuff and see if it speeds up a bit… chuck
Another thing to ponder is this…If one is going to ask a question why use the quote and quote picture and all? And why not use smaller Avatars instead of complete pictures??
The processor speed of the computer shouldn’t make much difference. I’m guessing your old computer was bogged down by spyware. Also cleaning all the crap out of your cache occasionally speeds things up immensely. My Alienware (2.8GHz) was offline for some minor work last week. Hooked up my son’s 1GHz Gateway to my DSL and it was just as fast at accessing web content.
Jeff