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This topic has 55 replies, 26 voices, and was last updated 17 December 2011 at 13:57 by jomac.

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7 December 2011 at 14:50 #37510
michael howarth 1
Participant
@michaelhowarth1
Advert

7 December 2011 at 14:50 #79398
michael howarth 1
Participant
@michaelhowarth1
Is anyone else experiencing problems accessing this site? I have a diabolically low broadband speed out in the stix ….1.77Mb/s and 0.3Mb/s upload. This is probably the cause but it would be nice to be sure before I attack BT.
7 December 2011 at 14:53 #79399
David Hanlon
Participant
@davidhanlon38496
I am reading this on a 2Mb/s line from Orange Telecom in the (French) Alps – it works for me …

Best Regards

Dave
7 December 2011 at 14:59 #79400
michael howarth 1
Participant
@michaelhowarth1
I am getting the site but to swap between posts takes up to half minute with a message showing “waiting for model engineer”…….it seems to be inferring that the site is to blame.

Obviously good quality Mb’s in France!
7 December 2011 at 15:05 #79401
Peter G. Shaw
Participant
@peterg-shaw75338
For a few days now I have been timed out when accessing some ME/MEW pages. Other forums are OK. Which suggests that there is nothing wrong with my individual broadband access.

Regards,

Peter G. Shaw
7 December 2011 at 15:07 #79402
David Hanlon
Participant
@davidhanlon38496
I am flipping quite happily between posts with little or no delay (at least at the moment) so I guess French electrons travel faster – at least after a good lunch!

Good Luck

Dave
7 December 2011 at 15:11 #79403
michael howarth 1
Participant
@michaelhowarth1
And your electrons will have to go up quite a steep hill if you are in the alps. There can be no excuses here in horizontal Lincolnshire!
7 December 2011 at 15:35 #79404
Robert Miller 1
Participant
@robertmiller1
Are you on a wireless network? If so, that may be the problem. I can top (or bottom) all as to speed, I have Xplornet’s high speed (ha!) wireless here in Ontario, Canada and though I am paying for 1.6Mb/s their fine print says UP TO 1.6Mbs, which in reality means down from 1.6Mb/s – which of course includes 1b/s. The reality is that I am one of 60 users sharing a 6Mb/s 912 MHz channel. The bottom line is that usually PDFs etc download at speeds typically about 180Kb/s but I frequently see speeds as low as 32Kb/s.

That said, I have no problem accessing the ME forum, but there are usually considerable delays. The digital editions are pretty much hopeless at these speeds though. A downloadable version would be nice.

Bob
7 December 2011 at 17:12 #79410
Terryd
Participant
@terryd72465
Hi Mick,

I have similar problems with slow loading and can usually get up to around 4mb/s ) but I often get the ‘Waiting for Model-engineer .co.uk’ message and I have several tabbed home pages on my FireFox and this site is usually the last to load.

I am in a village at just about the limit of the line from the exchange, but we are going fibre optic this month that should improve the problem, fingers crossed.

Having said that hough I have noticed that the situation is worse with the upgrade to FF 8. Many pages are slow to load and it appears to be stuck in a cache somewhere as if I click reload a page will suddenly load. I am reporting this to Mozilla. Chrome is much faster but there are issues with some aspects of creating posts for this forum, but not others.

Hi David,

You’re lucky to get 2mb/s in the Alps. In my property in Brittany we can only get dial up. At least until they decide to provide communal satellite facilities we’ve been promised for years.

Regards

Terry
7 December 2011 at 17:48 #79414
Ian Hewson
Participant
@ianhewson99641
Hi

No problems in Yorks, using imac on Safari at 4.3mbps pages load in seconds.

Regards

Ian
7 December 2011 at 19:11 #79418
michael howarth 1
Participant
@michaelhowarth1
I recognise the same problems that Terry is experiencing with this site ie waiting for response and posting. I am using Chrome. Other sites seem to respond immediately. The problem has come on over the last week or so. I am also getting “this page has become unresponsive” messages but on this site only. If you are reading this, Peter Shaw is this what you mean by being “timed out” ?

Robert…….reading your post has left me thinking that I am being pampered by BT !
7 December 2011 at 19:21 #79420
Ex contributor
Participant
@mgnbuk
Is anyone else experiencing problems accessing this site?

Yes, pretty well every visit. Very long page load times. I don’t think that the plethora of flashing adverts will help.

I’m running Firefox on Win XP (or Linux on another pc – just as slow) & have a 30Mb fibre optic connection that checks out at it’s rated speed.

Don’t have similar problems with other sites.

Regards,

Nigel B.
7 December 2011 at 20:42 #79428
Phil P
Participant
@philp
Yes that is what I am finding as well.

If you drag the scroll bar on the RHS of the page it goes in a “jerky” motion, and each jerk corresponds to the adverts updating.

Phil
7 December 2011 at 21:12 #79430
Peter G. Shaw
Participant
@peterg-shaw75338
Mick H,

Can’t actually remember what the error message is, but it implies that the system has failed to connect within whatever time is allowed to make the connection, hence “timed out”.

Although today’s systems are nothing like what I was trained on, when I was employed by BT, even then certain parts of the system had specific time-outs for certain conditions, after which the would disconnect itself. A good example today would be that if you leave the receiver off and don’t make a call, you will eventually be connected to the “howler” which produces that very loud noise to attract your attention. That is what I mean by timed out.

I am on Firefox v.8 on Win XP, use BT as my broadband supplier, and usually achieve a download of around 3MB. Don’t know the upload. And as others have said, no problems elsewhere.

Regards,

Peter G. Shaw
7 December 2011 at 22:00 #79437
John McNamara
Participant
@johnmcnamara74883
Hi All

I do not have problems with the site speed. “Down Under” in Melbourne Australia I use Telstra cable. (Using internet explorer) Moving around the MEW site is fairly snappy… Yes cable is fast but only as fast as the site feeding it. this suggests to me that the difficulties some are experiencing may be ISP related rather than the site itself.

The right hand scroll bar is not jerky.

I do wish the editor handled word documents properly, even selecting “post as word” it does not always work.

The flickering adds are a a little annoying. however at least the MEW site does not use the pain in you know where….. “pop up” or even worse drag you off somewhere else advertisements that some engineering related sites use. (Or even worse the adds the force you to wait for so many seconds) Bah humbug to them.

Cheers

John

Edited By John McNamara on 07/12/2011 22:07:04
7 December 2011 at 22:01 #79438
Peter Hall
Participant
@peterhall61789
Yes; I’m suffering from a slow reload rate too. It’s never been very fast, but seems to have become worse over the last week or two.

It’s probably a vain plea, but can someone get rid of the Flash ad content? I find all the animated stuff profoundly irritating and it clogs up the bandwidth as well as annoying people. Trust me; I am not a voice in the wilderness. I appreciate that the website is part of a commercial enterprise, but there are other ways of providing the required service without making things distracting and difficult for the users.

Only my two penn’orth.

Pete

Edited By Peter Hall on 07/12/2011 22:04:11
8 December 2011 at 00:42 #79445
ady
Participant
@ady
It’s probably a vain plea, but can someone get rid of the Flash ad
content? I find all the animated stuff profoundly irritating and it
clogs up the bandwidth as well as annoying people.

Clever lad. Most problems are from bandwidth hogging advertising bloatware.

In Firefox tools/addons you can disable everything, which helps a bit.

A lot of it is now embedded in the modern browsers., you get zero options

I learned 15 years ago…keep your old “outdated” software or you will regret it.

I use Internet Explorer 4 if I’m in a hurry.

The old browsers have none of the supporting software that modern browsers employ.

It’s a sort of conspiracy.

They tell you that the virus boogyman will get you…and then encourage you to download more bloatware packages.

Wikipedia is probably the biggest non-bloatware site left on the internet.

IMO Its convenience and speed of use have been a major factor in its success.

When you click on a link up to a hundred different sites from around the planet start loading their different bits for the page you view.

ME.co.uk has the fast bit, the message in text…but you won’t see that until the huge queue of advertising stuff has loaded itself onto your pooter and then the page can display.

Edited By ady on 08/12/2011 01:05:39
8 December 2011 at 01:03 #79446
Nicholas Farr
Participant
@nicholasfarr14254
Hi Mick, yes I too have had long delays for pages to load, and even had the message saying “web site not responing”, other sites load very fast on the other hand.

Regards Nick.
8 December 2011 at 01:09 #79448
ady
Participant
@ady
If a priority advertisers’ server does not respond, then the page will refuse to load.

On an old browser you will get a blank box with an “X” in it.

Some of you might have noticed that those blank boxes with the X in the top corner we got in previous years…..have now “disappeared”

Long live the democratic peoples digital eutopia…

Edited By ady on 08/12/2011 01:12:43
8 December 2011 at 08:43 #79452
michael howarth 1
Participant
@michaelhowarth1
Things seem to be much better this morning….much more responsive. Strangely, my download speed is down to 1.41Mb/s.
8 December 2011 at 09:47 #79454
Martin W
Participant
@martinw
I have also noticed times when this site seems to be very slow to load or to change pages. This happens even though I am on a cable connection with a quoted speed of 10Mbps. Tests indicate that the average connection speed is very close to this figure.

One can get a very good indication of true connection speed using one of the speed checking sites such as this one. Again one has to navigate around the advertising blurb but the results seem to be pretty accurate giving ‘ping time’, ‘download’ and ‘upload’ speeds. If you want more information there is a facility ‘Ping Test’ that measures more parameters and gives a quality rating for the connection.

Cheers

Martin
8 December 2011 at 09:51 #79455
RJW
Participant
@rjw
I used to have big issues with M.E. pages loading, especially at our property in SW France, where, like other posters here, we have to use dial-up.

The problem was so bad, I would never visit the site at all unless I disabled images loading in Firefox first.

FF8 update was supposed to have improved large memory useage by the programme, but I’ve seen little evidence of it, my CPU can still hit 60% – 75% useage when opening or page loading, but flash and GIFF animations do have a big effect on that.

Poor page loading can also be caused by a browser cache that’s nearly full, so try clearing cookies, temp files and history too, general housekeeping really.

We’re also on the final stretch to Christmas, and people are doing a lot of on-line shopping, which is gobbling up bandwidth and slowing things down generally – I couldn’t get into PayPal at all yesterday, and if the home page did load, it was text only, no graphics!

eBay is also getting hit, as images won’t load even on a sale item preview on listing pages.

The erratic scrolling of pages and especially the animated giff’s on here got so bloody annoying, I rarely had more than a quick flip through the new posts on the front page, then scarper, which I’m sure is not what the creators of the site ultimately intended – no visitors, no sales, but I suppose they have to make a trade off somewhere, as the adsvertising pays for the site, we don’t!

I was just pleased I didn’t suffer epilepsy, as I’ve often wondered if they could have an adverse effect on anyone afflicted with the condittion!

So! and to emphasise to the moderators and advertisers who may throw a wobbly over the following tips and think about removing my post – the Adverts remain, they just don’t p*ss people off enormously with their incessant blinking and other faffings around!

Follow the routines to the letter and you’ll be ok, it’s made my life a damned sight more pleasant when browsing this site for sure, and no more jerky page scrolling!

People may even Read the adverts instead of doing anything But, just to avoid them!

Hope it hits the spot for some of you!

John.

To disable animated
GIF’s in Firefox:

1) Open firefox Browser
2a) In
address bar (Type: about:config)
2b) If you are running FF3, (or see the dialogue box ‘Here there be Dragons’,
click ok to the message.
3) Find: image.animation_mode
4) Change the value to
none

To disable Flash
animations:

Flashblock for
Google Chrome:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gofhjkjmkpinhpoiabjplobcaignabnl

Flashblock for
Firefox:

http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

Edited By RJW on 08/12/2011 09:54:01

Edited By RJW on 08/12/2011 09:54:21

Edited By RJW on 08/12/2011 09:59:59
8 December 2011 at 10:18 #79456
RJW
Participant
@rjw
An additional note about Flashblock if you use Photobucket or similar sites as image storage for websites etc!

Where the flash images were operating, all you’ll see is a blank grey box with the letter ‘F’ in a circle at the centre, if you hover the mouse cursor over it, it will change to an arrow, clicking the arrow will cause the flash animation or browser plug-in to run.

What Flashblock will also do on Photobucket and similar sites which use Flash browser plug-ins for uploading images, or copy / pasting url’s to them into a forum or web page, is also disable the photo upload and url generator dialogue boxes, so you’ll need to hover the cursor over the ‘F’ then click the arrow and your photo upload / url generation dialogue boxes will open!

John
8 December 2011 at 10:18 #79457
ady
Participant
@ady
1) Open firefox Browser
2a) In
address bar Type: about:config
3) Find: image.animation_mode

4) Change the value to
none

Woah! Even more improvement for me, well worth a shot this one chaps.
8 December 2011 at 11:04 #79460
Les Jones 1
Participant
@lesjones1
Hi ady,

Thanks for that excellent tip. Just one point to add for others is that the change only takes effect next time Firefox is started,

Les.
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