Measurement Lab was founded by the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, Google Inc. and academic researchers. It provides access to five tools some of which have been mentioned earlier at Ghacks. The tools in question are:

• Network Diagnostic Tool – Test your connection speed and receive sophisticated diagnosis of problems limiting speed.
• Glasnost – Test whether BitTorrent is being blocked or throttled.
• Network Path and Application Diagnosis – Diagnose common problems that impact last-mile broadband networks.
• DiffProbe (coming soon) -Determine whether an ISP is giving some traffic a lower priority than other traffic.
• NANO (coming soon) -Determine whether an ISP is degrading the performance of a certain subset of users, applications, or destinations.

Only three of the tools are currently accessible on the M-Lab website. The Internet connection speed analysis can be directly initiated on the website without having to install third party software programs. The only requirement is the latest Java Runtime Environment to be able to run the diagnostics.

Each analysis provides results and the means to interpret those results. To achieve best results a server closest to you should be chosen. The speed analysis provides the means to identify problems with the connection or certain protocols.

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A good way to start is to backup the current settings to be able to restore them in case the optimization turns out to make things worse. Inexperienced users might want to use the Optimal Settings button in the main interface to apply changes automatically. It has to be noted that the TCP Optimizer will also backup the settings before making any changes to the system.

Advanced users on the other hand can run a handful of tests that test the latency or the largest MTU value before they change dozens of settings manually. Changes range from setting the MTU value to the maximum connections per server and host resolution priority settings.

TCP Optimizer can be helpful if a user experiences problems with his Internet connection. It can be related to settings of the host system. If that is the case those settings can be optimized using the software.

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A software program called Is It On by Erightsoft, the makers of the popular video converter Super, can do that. It is a small portable application for most Microsoft Windows operating systems that can check the status of a connection in a heartbeat and displays a green or gray light depending on the status.

The interface of the software application is as basic as it can get with virtually no settings available at all. It displays three items under Network Status: Direct Active Internet Connection, Lan Connection and Behind Intranet Network Proxy.

Depending on the type of Internet connection of the user’s computer it will display green lights if the connection is active, gray lights if the connection is not (currently) active. Is It On will automatically detect changes to the network status and display the information in a matter of seconds in the program’s interface.

The interface has been designed to be always on top with no option to minimize the window or reduce its size. That’s probably the greatest weakness of the application. It would be nice if the application’s interface could be reduced so that only the lights are shown. Moving it to the Windows System Tray with an option to automatically notify the user of status changes to the Internet connection would be another nice feature.

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I was left with no choice but to wait until my Internet connection would be working again. This was an awkward situation for me because it disturbed my usual work flow which sees me working in the morning, getting out some posts, checking stats and creating new content for other sites that I own. All of this was delayed.

What could I do in the time that my Internet connection was down? I decided to run scan disk on all of my hard drives and Smart Defrag afterwards to optimize them. This are tasks that do not require my attention and I went to town earlier than I wanted to grab two Japanese learning books that I ordered and bring in my Nokie N73 cellphone which stopped working suddenly.

But the real question that would interest me is this: What are you doing if your Internet connection is down? Are you doing something else? I suppose that only a few of you are making their money working on the Internet which might mean that it is not tragic if you cannot connect to the Internet for a few hours.

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Dial Up users need to transfer data between the local computer and the Internet to keep the connection alive. This can be done manually by refreshing a website every other minute or by using dial up software like Connection Keeper that operates in the background performing the task to keep the connection alive.

Connection Keeper simulates a web browser loading an Internet page every two minutes. Two minutes is the default value which can be changed in the options. The software program can either query existing websites that have been added to the application by the user or simulate the traffic only without querying a real website.

Keep Connection Alive

Connection Keeper provides access to a few features that customize the process further. The user can pick a duration in hours that he wants Connection Keeper to run and decided if the application should terminate the Internet connection after that time.

The same window contains options to set the maximum query time for each request and error reporting which can be set to log errors to a file or to email errors to a recipient.

It comes with a few skins and an option to manually request a query to keep the connection alive. Best of all it is only using 1.5 Megabytes of computer memory in minimized state. Connection Keeper runs on all Microsoft operating systems from Windows 98 to Windows Vista.

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