cholla

Test the ports on your firewall at this site . https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2 If that doesn't work select Home from the site & then keep selecting the Sheilds Up test. The reason I put this in is when I selected the link to test it it had my address it may automatically have yours when you select it.If it doesnt the you need to go to home at the sit & back through. With Outpost mine shows complete stealth.I haven't tried Zone Alarm so I don't know if its good or bad. I used Sygate at one time but my OS didn't like it.It had some features I definately liked though like backtrace.& Its main screen traffic monitor is OK.

karthic ;I have an icon in my task bar for outpost right click it.select "Show Outpost Firewall" That should bring up your main screen for the firewall.Select the Options pulldown select Applications There should be 3 categories: Blocked Applications ,Partially Allowed Applications,& Trusted Applications.If IE is under Blocked Applications Highlight it & select remove.I'm not sure how to add it to Trusted from there.Reboot & try to connect to IE you should get an Allow this window.Allow all applications of this site or something like that select to allow it. I run mine under the rules wizard policy.

This is mine a little fast for me but I'm not complaining. :::.. Download Stats ..::: Connection is:: 59 Kbps about 0.1 Mbps (tested with 97 kB) Download Speed is:: 7 kB/s Tested From:: https://testmy.net Test Time:: Sat Feb 18 03:51:14 CST 2006 Bottom Line:: 1X faster than 56K 1MB download in 146.29 sec Diagnosis: May need help : running at only 8.53 % of your hosts average (nts-online.net) Validation Link:: https://testmy.net/stats/id-A1C73FY2D

karthic ;I just checked the links I posted & both worked for me no problem.

boywonder;You sure picked a cold weekend to visit Oklahoma.Since I live in the Texas Panhandle Oklahoma has some simular weather depending on the part of OK. It probably is a line problem if the SNR dropped There are a lot of causes for this.I'm posting a lot of info on it .Unfortunatly not a fix for it. An Introduction to Load Coils and Bridge Taps There seems to be some confusion as to what can be causing the new modems not to reach the Golden ring of 56K baud rates. I may be able to clear some of this up.It probably won't help fix the problem but at least we all point our finger at the same cause and effect. Load Coils Load coils (impedance matching transformers) are placed along the length of a long Telco POTs line that exceeds the 6000ft termination spec. The twisted pair of an analog line is a "balanced pair" interface with specific impedance terminations 600 or 900 ohms. The impedance loads are initially found in the "Line Card" at the telco switch and the telephone or modem. Impedance load is very different from loop resistance.Those terminations are engineered for the specific 600 or 900 ohm value to match the Amplitude and Frequency characteristics of the analog signal. The proper impedance termination is vital to absorb the maximum possible power on the line. If the impedance loads are not properly matched to the signal, they will only absorb part of of the signal and cause an improper signal transfer to the switches receiver circuitry. The problem starts to become evident when you wonder this - "If the energy of the signal is only partially absorbed, what happens to the stuff that's not absorbed?" All energy that is not absorbed by the termination load reflects back on to the copper pair and begins to interfere with the original signal. Because the reflected signal is usually out of phase from the original signal, this starts to cause "common mode rejection" or cancellation or loss of Amplitude at specific "standing wave" frequencies and their mathematical derivatives. The net effect of that is, the original signal begins to get crippled by its own reflection. The Evil Load Coils are placed in the circuit at specific intervals (varies depending on wire gauge and cable bundling variables) to reduce the effective capacitance of the extended copper loop and therefore provide a higher level of predictability across the copper segment. Remember, impedance matching, in theory, only works if you can predict the signal characteristics of the waveform being impeded. Anything that drastically alters the characteristics of the waveform will make the circuits termination less effective in absorbing the maximum signal. The argument is that, three discrete segments of 6,000 feet copper has less negative capacitive effects than a single copper segment that is perhaps 18,000 feet long. Therefore, in a long copper loop, Load coils are placed at strategic points to reduce the negative effects that capacitance will have on the signals characteristics. Capacitance is the enemy of high BAUDrate applications. Amplitude can be overcome with amplifiers, Capacitance is much harder to control cheaply. This load coil works wonderfully for voice, however; load coils, with their purpose to limit excess capacitance, also greatly limits the frequency spectrum available to the end devices. By the way, load coils also help restrict impulse noise or interference from one copper segment to adjacent copper segment. So in effect may reduce the additional noise characteristics from loop interference. Now back to the limit of frequencies. There are a few variables that affects this discovery either positive or negative. But in general, placing a load coil in a Telco voice line reduces the effective bandwidth by chopping off the top 25 percent of the available frequencies. If you are to take a tone generator to the lines you would see the highest quality signal at approximately 1,000 to 2,000 Hz. When the tone generator reached 2900 Hz there would be a significant "role off" of over 12dB per octave. This reduction explains why you can't use load coils in digital circuits. As a matter of reference if you examined a T1 signal with a scope it would look like a very phase distorted 772KHz analog signal. Certainly any facility that limited the bandwidth to 2900 Hz would seriously choke a signal running at 772KHz. The same holds true for ISDN BRI which has an effective signal rate of approximately 40KHz. So, it becomes obvious that load coils can cripple the high speed signal. Please note, that removing the load coils will only make the signal worse. Because of the nature and characteristics of how modems manipulate an analog signal, removing the load coils will just cause exponentially more distortion across the copper segment. If you want to remove the load coils you must completely re engineer the way the data signal is presented to the copper pair. Thats what they did with ISDN. I don't think anybody is really up for the challenge at this point. Bridge Taps These little bastards are perhaps the most annoying and offensive of all the anomalies found in a Telco copper segment. They are by far the number one problem you all have getting modems to connect and stay connected at high speeds. Unfortunately they are riddled throughout most residential neighborhoods and corporate business parks. W hen the phone company runs a cable down the street the cable may extend a mile or so passed your house. Although no other house or device is using your specific copper pair, the pair runs out the length of the cable. All an installer does is take the wires that come from your demarc, drag them out to a junction box or splice box on a poll or pedestal and "Tap" the wires coming from your house on to a spare copper pair that runs out the length of the cable. They do not cut the cable pair at the junction box just incase they have to use the same pair for one of your neighbors down the road when you move out. Also, in order not to drastically reduce the amplitude and of the signal coming from your telephone they do not to terminate the extended cable end either. That means there may be a one mile cable running from the central office out past your house and your telephone line is simply tapped into the middle of it. It's sort of like having an additional half-mile antenna picking up all the garbage in the airand feeding it to your telephone equipment. Assuming for a moment we can deal with the additional idle channel noise on the copper facility, which even the most unqualified lineman can test for, (but if you ask him what he's testing for he probably can't tell you), and tell you some story how your line is the quietest line on the street, the next hurdle beyond the noise is the reflected signal coming back off of the half-mile unterminated antenna they built just for you at no additional charge. When an electrical signal hits the end of a wire it has to go somewhere. If there is no impedance load to absorb the signal,then the signal in its entirety gets reflected back over the entire copper segment. The signal that comes from your modem headed for the central office arrives at a specific time interval and the reflected signal coming back off the unterminated copper extension comes then just behind yours causing your signal to appear phase distorted. When two out of phase signals are received at a certain impedance load of a cause a rejection affects and begin to cancel each other out. If the signals arrives 180 degrees out of phase your signal can be canceled out completely. The more the second reflected signal it is closer to 180 degrees the more the signal will be attenuated and phase distorted. At lower frequencies problem is not terribly dramatic as these reflections are only fractions of a waveform out of phase. But when you make the waveform's smaller as is the case with higher frequencies the problem becomes exponentially more apparent. Phase is much more an issue with smaller, shorter or higher frequency wave forms. In a nutshell, we are screwed. Even when you can get them to, a customers residence and have a line tested, they DO NOT test the frequency response of the line. They perform the following two tests.. The first test it is a 1,000 Hz tone coming from the central office switch and measured at the customers demark for attenuation. The 1,000 Hz tone is significant because it is smack in the middle of the voice frequency range (your vocal cords cannot really make sound above 3000 Hz). Assuming they have their test equipment Setup and terminated properly they can get a dB measurement of the 1,000 Hz tone and say that is in some specified range. Please note that there are no documented specified ranges for analog voice lines using this test setup. The results of this test are merely to identify the signal level coming in. I believe somewhere between -6dbm and -20dbm is acceptable but I'm not really sure. the second test they may perform it is terminating the line and doing a Cmsg noise test measuring the title channel noise on the facility with no signal provided. Ideally there are some specifications that identify how much of this noise is tolerable for a voice circuit but I'm sure the tester doesn't know where that acceptable threshold is. The tester might as well pickup of the telephone receiver and blow in to it to see if the line passes mustard.... The problem was this noise test is that putting a signal on the line generates additional noise and interference that the modems have to contend with all the time. This noise is not present when the line is just quietly terminated at each end. The test I would really like them to perform is a frequencies sweep between 300 and 4000 Hz and a Bridge tapped test to determine how out of phase my signal may look by the time it gets to the central office and whether it falls into specific characteristics too. If these tests are routinely performed on the TOLL grade facilities between telco central offices they should also be performed at the customers request on the drop side of the switched circuit. It time consuming, its out of the question. I've had the conversation with several Telco repair supervisors about lifting Bridge taps and performing signal-to-noise ratio tests. The conversation ends when they say "we do not guarantee data of above 2400 Baud". They are right too this isnot a conditioned data line and I have no recourse. Incidentally, this bridge tap problem became apparent right after 9600 baud modem's where replaced with 14.4k modems. The problem then got escalated with 28.8 and now begins to take on monstrous effects on the new super modems. It is an interesting argument, putting these modems on voice lines and pushing the envelope beyond their engineered usefulness. The real culprits in this equation is not the Telcos. It is the bastard scum bag modem manufacturers pulling the wool over the eyes of the consumer and expecting us to make it work and/or absorb all of the S#!t when it doesn't Telcos do not want you to use high speed modems on your voice lines anyway so you'll find a very limited support from that camp. Signal to Noise Ratio lower than 37 dB indicates a call with reduced quality. You need a SNR of at least 37 dB in order to sustain a 28.8 kB/s modem connection. You need a SNR of at least 38 or 39 dB to sustain a 33.6 kB/s connection. For you technical types, here are some of the phone line bandwidth, frequency response and related technical parameters expected by the new 56k modems: 3600 Hz of usable bandwidth between 150 - 3750 Hz with -Less than 10 dB rolloff at the low end between 150 and 300 Hz -Less than 24 dB rolloff at the high end between 3450 and 3750 Hz -Better than -50 dB receive level at 3750 Hz -No load coils -No bridge taps -No wire gauge changes -Less than 43 dB attenuation end-to-end -Maximum of one (1) digital-to-analog transition Any telephone company engineer will tell you these are some really extraordinary parameters to expect from the average subscriber's phone line. The POTS line consists of two wires called tip and ring. These two wires provide DC current to power the telephone electronics, AC current to ring the telephone bell or electronic ringer, and a full duplex balanced voice path. This is a closed loop, balanced system not referenced to earth ground. The POTS phone line, with all phones on-hook, should measure around 48 volts DC. Taking a phone off-hook creates a DC signal path across the pair, which is detected as loop current back at the central office. This drops the voltage measured at the phone down to about 3 to 9 volts. An off-hook telephone typically draws about 15 to 20 milliamps of DC current to operate, at a DC resistance around 180 ohms. The remaining voltage drop occurs over the copper wire path and over the telephone company circuits. These circuits provide from 200 to 400 ohms of series resistance to protect from short circuits and decouple the audio signals. POTS Line Characteristics: Bandwidth: 180 Hz to 3.2 KHz The low end is rolled off early to stay away from the 60 Hz region. Also, telecom isolation and hybrid transformers would be much more bulky, (and expensive) if they had to carry signals down to 20 Hz. The high end cut off is more critical. Voice on the telephone network is digitized at 8 KHz sampling rate which means that any signal above 4 KHz will be aliased back as noise in the voice band. Most voice CODECs roll off at about -25dB at 4 KHz with a -3dB down point around 3.2 KHz. The phone company decided years ago that the 180 Hz to 3.2 KHz range would be sufficient for speech intelligibility while allowing them to multiplex many calls over coax and twisted pair. Signal to Noise: Approximately 45 dB This is not as easy to quantify because noise comes in many forms, such as electrical interference from fluorescent fixtures or hiss from the many amplifier stages in the voice path. Speech correlated noise can be introduced from non-linear speech coding and compression algorithms. Crosstalk from other conversations is another form of noise. The phone company uses 8 bit mulaw nonlinear coding which yields about 12 bits of dynamic range. The bottom line is that you can never count on more than about 45 dB signal to noise ratio. Signal Levels: -9 dBm average speech across tip/ring. Speech peaks out to +4 dBm can be measured at the phone, but anything over 0dBm at the central office will be clipped. The FCC requires that all telephone audio interconnect equipment limit speech to -9dBm, averaged over 3 seconds. Consult FCC Part 68 requirements for all the details. Resistance reduces the current so increases the loss. Capacitance effectivly short circuits the line more as frequencies increase so increasing loss. Inductance resists current flow more as frequencies get higher thus increasing the loss. Everything that carries electricity has what is known as "Resistance". This is measured in "Ohms" and resistance impedes the flow of current in a conductor. Because your connection is two wires twisted together it also has some "Capacitance" between the wires. A capacitor is an electrical component and there is more current passed through it as the frequency gets higher. also your pair of wires has yet another characteristic called "Inductance" and inductance allows less current to flow through it as the frequency gets higher.

karthic;This will get you the free Outpost DL.The first is a link to the DL site you can read about this firewall & the second is the DL if you don't want to read about it first. http://www.majorgeeks.com/download1056.html http://majorgeeks.com/downloadget.php?id=1056&file=1&evp=a7f82e53997e580ed0f67cb5f591f7e2

drifter0000;I'm not sure if this will help you but check these links.I wrote them for dial-up but I would like to know if the settings are in the same location for a cable modem. I think some of the tweaks will apply to a cable modem they are for 98. http://www.testmy.net/forum/index.php?topic=9647.msg94293#msg94293 http://www.testmy.net/forum/index.php?topic=9597.msg93043#msg93043 I use Agnitum Outpost for a firewall.I had Sygate at one time but it started messing up so I switched & haven't had any problems.Its free if you just keep the trial version(no time limit ) If you upgrade you get support & a few extra features.

Probably just network traffic or sometimes bad weather causes a slowdown in dial-up.If its stays down then maybe the phone company or your ISP.I suspect mine of keeping my speed down because it used to be faster.Both will tell you they don't "cap" dial-up .

There you go pitbull481 topics merged as requested.

I voted no.I have explained in other posts that I basically hold to protectionism for the USA.This would be just one more way to get us more involved in world politics which always seems to create more problems for us than it solves.ie Iraq

php;So is there anything coknuck can do to correct the problem? I don't have any as long as the avatars are not larger than 100X100 myself & some even larger ones seem to fit without scroll bars for me.But I beleive the max for an animated avatar is 100 X 100. coknuck I reworked this one so now it should work as an animated avatar.

coknuck;Wonder why it puts scroolbars on the avatars on a larger screen .I guess it could be in the display adapter.Mines just an onboard chip S3Inc Trio3D.Kind of out dated for some graphics.

coknuck ; I have a 17" crt monitor set 1024 X 768.

coknuck;I think as long as they are 100 X 100 they won't have the scroll bars.But thanks for the resize.At least I don't have scrool bars on anybodies that is 100 X 100 on my screen.

tommie gorman ; In the Texas panhandle windmills for water have been kind of a tradition so I doubt if they could get them stopped.I was talking about more of a government program putting in the windmills so that would be harder to stop.What I beleive is they try to build them too big anyway several smaller windmills make more since to me.& would be a lot quiter & cheaper to maintain.Say 5000000 windmills in the Texas panhandle would generate a lot of electricity,create a lot of jobs & could be the size of the ones used to pump water.The suffer much less stress than the huge ones & enough small ones would generate more electricty. On the natural gas people are definately being misled.In Alaska they pump it back into old wells because the wouldn't let the government build another pipe like the one for oil.The thing is there is already one in Canada that we would only have to build about 400 miles of pipe to connect too.Then pay Canada something for letting us use it.So far this is not even planned. Its bad here because we pay more for instae natural gas than what they ship out of state. In Amarillo a rich rancher donated a huge gas deposit about a 100 years ago to give Amarillo a cheap supply.The city found a way to sell it off to Boone Pickens a Texas oil man.He ended up stripping what he sold us so it wasn't nearly as good.& was allowed to sell any excess he pumped out if we had been supplied. It will be cool if this hydraulic vehicle works like the articl said .I'm waiting to read more about it.

I knew they weren't all avatars a couple I put in are just pictures but could be used for avatars.I guess almost any pic can. disturbed:CA3LE could probably tell you for sure but I think the only way is size 100 X 100 max.

Hi all;There are some funny pics here but most are not avatars.The profile program will resize the still pics OK so some of them will resize alright.Thew might look out of proportion or ones with print not readable. I beleive the max size for an animated gif avatar is 100 X 100 & maybe 80 X 100.CA3LE reworked one of the ones I'm putting here for me so it would work.It is 80 X 100.It is the second one.Some others will have to be resized to be animated.I don't have the software to do this or haven't learned to use what I have to do this but i'm sure someone here can do it for you if you can't I reworked a couple of the avatars they should work as animated avatars now.

tommie gorman ;There are a lot of undeveloped sources for electricity.In my part of the country we have a lot of wind but it is only minimally tapped.Although it would have some enviromental impact they could literally put wind chargers down every section line here with minimal interference to the farms & ranches This could generate far more electricity than our area could use.One of the problems is when the wind is light whichis not very often there hasn't been a good way to store it.If they could or would develope the right batteries for this that would be one way.I just thought if this hydraulic system could power a vehicle it might be a way to store wind energy & power alternators or generators to produce the energy constantly. There are many ways to tap the enviroment to produce energy.So far solar panels are the least efficient.Hydroelectric is good but did you realize they can build ocean hydroelectric dams that use the tides going in & out to generate electricity they just don't We have a great amount of methane we don't use or even hear about using.Or how much methane do you think the human sewage in sewer plants generates everyday.This could be collected burned in stationary engines to generate electricty to power homes & electric cars.Not to mention the cattle & other feedlot operations are also a source of methane.There are also vast deposits of methane in the oceans. Less good are the way a lot is generated now fossil fuelslike natural gas.coal , & other petroleum sources & of course nuclear power plants.If they can ever develope cold fussion of course that would generate all we need.

I haven't had any problems with AVG it updates once a day like its supposed too.I've only needed to run it in safe mode once to get rid of a couple of viruses that it wouldn't get in normal but that was over a year ago. I tried the Kaspersky online scan & it never found anything so I guess AVG is keeping my OS clean.

Bwalker25:Yes it must still run on gas if it didn't there wouldn't be a MPG rating deisel would probably be even better MPG.I haven't read about this technology & intend to if it developes.My problem with it is the high pressure cylinder that would hold the hydraulic pressure.How does this react in an accident? I still want to see them develope a high efficency large capicty light weight battery for an all electric vehicle.Then they could use something like the hydraulic pressure tank to save wind energy while stationary & drive an alternator to charge the efficent battery.

asubaseball727;I looked at the linkin your post to a link Swimmer posted & it seemed like a good idea to remove unused devices & drivers by that method.I would do this one at a time though with the most recent first.Then see if the problem is resolved. The MS article in peepnklowns post looked good too.

Interesting I used bredband.com for the reverse tracert because I remembered it from Van Buren's tracert's & needed a European address.Its not an exact reverse but notice the latency increases after it crosses the Atlantic either direction.

cif ; Glad you got it working .So it was a cable problem just not a bad cable.I might have suggested they were switched but I didn't know you had the CD connection loose.

This is the MS article on it http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prmd_stp_ottj.asp But like trogers said you have a lot of company with this problem I looked at a couple of links & found suggestions it was a bad driver.virtual memory set wrong,& even a bad fan causing overheating. My guess is its an IRQ conflict.Meaning you have 2 or more drivers trying to use or access the same IRQ at the same time.

trogers: Except for a little variation in the examples the article made I basically agree with it. Capacity is advertised as speed. tommie gorman :DSL would definately be faster.But on the 56K the combined 2 56k lines would would load faster because more data would be coming into the connection at once.I think it would test faster on a download test or upload for this reason.If the speed was measured from each 56K line seperatly then it would be the same speed as 1 56k modem on that line.The only bottleneck would be if the PC receiving the data could process all of it as fast as it was coming in. I have never used a bonded modem system(shotgun) .I would like to see how one performed.With DSL as cheap as it is now when it is available it would be better performance for less money.But if only dial-up was available & cost wasn't a factor then a multiple line system would definately improve performance for some things.Probably not gaming though.