Can I Safely Exceed the Speed Limit?

August 5, 2006 2:36 AM

Should I install Google Web Accelerator? What are its benefits and risks? I'm using a Dell Inspiron 5000 w/a 448 MHz Celeron processor and am looking to speed things up in any safe way that I can. I noticed yesterday that Google is discreetly promoting the Accelerator at the bottom of its search results.
posted by NYCinephile to computers & internet (22 comments total)

You lose your privacy.

You may gain some speed.

(It's actually not a bad personal caching proxy. Just make sure you turn off all the pre-fetching options.)
posted by krisjohn at 2:39 AM on August 5, 2006

Krisjohn, thanks for responding so promptly. I'm new to the concept of "pre-fetching"...will you elaborate?
posted by NYCinephile at 3:03 AM on August 5, 2006

Information we collect

* You do not need to provide any personal information in order to download and use Google Web Accelerator.
* When you use Google Web Accelerator, Google servers automatically receive and log your web requests. Web requests and data sent in encrypted form using an HTTPS connection will not go through Google. It is possible that a URL or other page information sent to Google may itself contain personal information. For information about how some web sites embed personal information in web requests, click here.
* Google temporarily caches cookies from third party sites that are used in your web requests. For more information, please see the Help Center.
* To accelerate delivery of content, Google Web Accelerator retrieves and caches web pages before you request them. Therefore, your Google Web Accelerator cache may include copies of web pages you have not visited. You can clear the cache following instructions in the Help Center.


It keeps track of what web sites you visit frequently and will store copies of them on your hard drive so that you don't have to download the whole page every time.

If you are going to trust anyone with this kind of information, Google is probably a safe bet. If Google goes rogue, at least you won't be the only one in a world of hurt.
posted by sophist at 3:56 AM on August 5, 2006

Why not just try it?
posted by cillit bang at 4:32 AM on August 5, 2006

No, you lose privacy. And all it's doing is storing frequently accessed pages; you won't be getting new pages much faster. To improve speed, get a faster transport (from modem to DSL or DSL to cable). If you really want cacheing and pre-fetching, use something local (like squid) or set Firefox to pre-fetch; these won't sacrifice your privacy.
posted by orthogonality at 5:27 AM on August 5, 2006 [1 favorite]

when in doubt, buy more ram.
posted by sophist at 5:34 AM on August 5, 2006

I'm not sure that it's relevant to the discussion, but since the points were raised: my machine has 512MB of RAM, and I'm using Verizon DSL in NYC.
posted by NYCinephile at 5:40 AM on August 5, 2006

I'm new to the concept of "pre-fetching"...will you elaborate?

When you go to a webpage, the Web Accelerator will look through the pages to find links to other pages. For each linked page, it will (invisibly to the user) go to the page and download the content. This means if you do click on a link, the page's contents will already have been downloaded so it will appear faster.

This can be a bad idea sometimes. For example, if you log in to your email in your browser (e.g. hotmail,gmail etc), and there's a link to "delete all my email" somewhere on the page, Google Web Accelerator will invisibly click on that link, thinking it's a link to another page, thus deleting all your email.

There are some safeguards against this: for example, I don't think it prefetches pages on secure (SSL) connections. But I would turn it off just in case.
posted by matthewr at 7:11 AM on August 5, 2006

The 512MB of ram is doing you worlds more hurt than any software tool is going to heal. Unfortunately, it seems like you're stuck with it - the inspiron doesn't support any more than that.

Windows really just doesn't do very well with that little ram.
posted by dmd at 7:26 AM on August 5, 2006

You could try the privoxy proxy (there's files for windows). It's like squid in that it caches, but it also strips ads, which will likely make some pages faster.

However, obviously, while it's great for personal use, I wouldn't consider it for a large network. For that I would use squid. :-)
posted by shepd at 7:59 AM on August 5, 2006

I wrote a few pieces about this last year:

http://www.aquick.org/blog/2005/05/08/google-is-destroying-the-private/

http://www.aquick.org/blog/2005/05/05/google-wants-your-logs/
posted by Caviar at 8:19 AM on August 5, 2006

There have been some cases where the Google Accelerator would serve someone your logged-in account page from its cache on various forums.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 8:47 AM on August 5, 2006

Cosidering most webpages are 90% advertising graphics, you can block ads very easily. This method works pretty well. Its a must-have for slow computers and dial-up connections.
posted by the ghost of Ken Lay at 2:24 PM on August 5, 2006

Also you should try the following (google for them if you dont understand)

1. Defrag your drive.
2. Disable uneeded services.
3. Update the drivers on you dell. support.dell.com. Especially chipset, network, video, and BIOS.
4. Scan for spyware.
5. Disable everything you dont need at startup.
6. Try opera or firefox to see if they make a difference.
7. Empty out you browser cache. Do a disk cleanup.
posted by the ghost of Ken Lay at 2:27 PM on August 5, 2006

matthewr nailed the pre-fetching problem.

One of the pest ways to speed up your web browsing is to install an ad filter. I use Proxomitron with the JD5000 ruleset.

If you're low on RAM and you're using Firefox, try:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Memory_Leak#Settings_that_reduce_memory_usage
posted by krisjohn at 4:16 PM on August 5, 2006

Dont waste money on RAM as others have suggested. You have more than enough. The real bottleneck here is that 466mhz "Mendocino" Celeron. That's chip was released in 1999. You have a seven year old computer! Its at least three generations behind. Time to toss it an go with a new machine.
posted by the ghost of Ken Lay at 4:25 PM on August 5, 2006

The real bottleneck here is that 466mhz "Mendocino" Celeron.

That processor is more than fast enough. This is Web surfing -- the computer is going to spend most of its time waiting for the network.
posted by kindall at 6:13 PM on August 5, 2006

That processor is more than fast enough.

Last year I finally replaced my old PII 400. If was fine for plain ol' web surfing, true, but Flash or Java (in ads, for the most part) would slow it down substantially, sometimes to a crawl, though I had everything tweaked for max performance.

Try ad-blocking first. Go from there.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:15 PM on August 5, 2006

I appreciate your comments and suggestions.

Since the subject of speed tweaks was raised...if you feel it is appropriate to address in this thread, which would you recommend, given my system's configuration?
posted by NYCinephile at 2:14 AM on August 6, 2006

With all due respect, dmd; 512MB is plenty for even WinXP, as long as you're not trying to run Photoshop at the same time.

256MB is admittedly borderline, but I've never really run into a machine with 512 that appeared to have RAM exhaustion problems, and I had about 150 machines to choose from...
posted by baylink at 1:35 PM on August 6, 2006

This is correct. 256Mb will give you disk thrashing as it hits VM, 512Mb will be fine in almost all cases.

As far as tweaking goes, NYCinephile, try some googlesearching, I'd have to suggest. I've been tweaking Windows since the days of Win3.0, and it's something that's not really explainable in less than a book-length post, and sometimes as much of an art as a science. There are some basic things you can do to make a low-spec machine a little peppier, and almost any tweak guide will have them listed.

Warning, though: you can bork your system pretty well if you don't know what you're doing, so be prepared to flatten&reinstall XP if your tweaking goes awry.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:35 PM on August 6, 2006

Coincidentally, Lifehacker had a posting re: a 15-minute XP tune-up this morning.
posted by NYCinephile at 9:43 AM on August 8, 2006