Make your surfing experience smoother
Five quick tips to simplify navigating the Internet
By Alyson Munroe
Feel like you're stuck in the slow lane surfing the information superhighway? These simple steps will take your online experience from zero to 100 m.p.h. in no time flat!
Compare dial-up vs. high-speed
Vancouver's C.E. Jones can hardly contain her excitement when she talks about switching from dial-up to high-speed. "I love it!" she says. "I don't know how I lived without it for so long. Surfing isn't a chore anymore."
Before, Jones would only turn on her home computer when she had to dial in for work. Now she switches it on as soon as she gets home each day and spends an extra hour or two surfing just for the fun of it. She's even discovered online games, which she says would have taken her forever to play using dial-up.
Think of your connection speed like a vehicle. You can surf the web with a Ferrari (high-speed) or with a Fiat (dial-up). A 56K modem downloads information up to 56 Kbps (kilobits per second). In general, high-speed modems download information up to 3 Mbps (megabits per second), which is 3,000 kilobits per second. So, downloading a 1MB game from the Internet would take approximately three minutes using a 56K modem, but approximately 34 seconds over a high-speed connection.
With high speed you aren't tying up your phone line, so you can take calls and surf at the same time.
Gaye Lefaivre of West Vancouver spent five years on dial-up only using the Internet to check e-mail. Then her sister told her about a sale on high-speed and Lefaivre decided to sign up. She couldn't believe the difference.
"Before, it was too slow and costly to spend time cruising the Net," she says. "Now I leave my computer on all the time, and I've even started shopping online for books and electronics."
Whatever your connection speed, you can have a speedier surfing experience by following these simple tips:
- Set your home page
- Add to and organize your Favorites
- Use search engine toolbars
- Clear your cache
- Discover other time-saving tips
Set your home page
Save time and make your most visited web site your home page. That way it loads each time you open your browser. In Internet Explorer (IE), go to your favourite web site and select Tools > Internet Options. Click Use Current > OK.
When selecting a home page, remember to pick one without a lot of graphics so it loads quickly.
Add to and organize your Favorites
Typing URLs is time-consuming, and remembering them is often a problem if they're long. Save time by adding frequently visited web sites to your Favorites in IE. When you find a web site you like, click on Favorites > Add to Favorites.
There are lots of ways to organize these sites. In IE, you can right-click on the Favorites window and Sort by Name, which will list your sites alphabetically. Or you can click on Favorites > Organize Favorites and create folders like recipes, travel or finances. After you make folders, you can click on a link and move it into a folder for easy access.
To visit a site you've saved, click on its name in your Favorites list.
Use search engine toolbars
Search engines like MSN and Dogpile offer free toolbars that allow you to search the web without visiting their home pages. These toolbars typically attach themselves to your browser and stay with you wherever you go on the Internet.
Most toolbars block pop-up ads, too, which delay the downloading of a web page and waste time when you're forced to manually close them.
Clear your cache
Browsers save a copy of each web page you visit in a cache on your hard drive. When you revisit that page, the browser can display it from your cache instead of downloading it again. While designed to speed up your surfing, the opposite can happen when your cache gets too full of these temporary Internet files (all the HTML, graphics and text on a given web page). Clearing your cache regularly frees up valuable hard-drive space and speeds up your surfing.
Clear your IE cache by going to Tools > Internet Options. Under Temporary Internet Files, go to Delete Files > OK.
Discover other time-saving tips
Shortcuts speed up common tasks because you don't need to move your hand from your keyboard to your mouse.
- CTRL+N opens a new window
- CTRL+W closes the active window
- CTRL+I opens or closes your Favorites
- CTRL+O lets you open a file on your hard drive
- CTRL+F lets you search for a word within a web page
- CTRL+TAB highlights your address bar
- Hold Shift and click the left mouse button on a link to open it in a new window
- Type a site's name (Hotmail, for example) in your address bar and hit Ctrl+Enter. IE will automatically populate the http://www. and the .com so you don't have to!
