Patience is probably your only pal if you are using the internet in a bandwidth starved campus like mine ..To be honest there are times when it takes all my self control to stop from chucking my laptop out of the window. Here are some tips for those suffering from this bandwidth syndrome that i find useful:
First, get a browser that will help you save bandwidth. Mozilla Firefox, for instance, works on compression techniques that will load webpages much faster. Second, advertisements, especially Flash-based ones, are a major bandwidth hog. Kill these and you will end up saving a considerable amount of bandwidth. ..
For this, Firefox comes with a couple of good add-ons such as Adblocker and Flashblocker. Also tweak your Explorer’s setting to disable images when not required and you will see the pages loading much quicker. For this you could use another Firefox extension called Imglikeopera Extension. This will load images from cache and saves images on your PC, so they don’t require to be summoned from the respective websites—thus saving bandwidth.
While on the topic of images, while sending pictures, make sure you are not transferring high-resolution ones. Use a photo editor program likeMicrosoft Image Resizer to shrink pictures before you send them via email or upload them on a website.
Auto updates might be a good thing for those working on a healthy internet. But for those working on threadbare speeds, it’s a good idea to turn these off. Because these programs keep downloading latest updates from the internet as soon as they are available, they end up using precious bandwidth...better use local hubs like DC++ to download the latest updates .
Webaroo (www.webaroo. com) is another interesting application the bandwidth starved. This is an offline browsing program that basically downloads pages from sites that you frequently visit on to your hard disk, thus making them locally available.
The latest version , Webaroo 2, also lets you download videos from YouTube, Metacafe, Google Videos and other sites as well as download Flickr Photos by user, group and photoset. It’s also a good idea to have this handy if you subscribe to tons of RSS feeds...
Happy surfing !!...