Not maxxing out newsgroups any more

[Alto]

I thought VM were playing silly buggers up until recently, but I was wrong!

I'd noticed my Astraweb connection speeds were all over the place, even in the middle of the night when I used to be able to max things out on my 20MB connection. In fact it was this that made me think that there was a problem with my pc rather then VM or Astraweb. (I use XP on a 5 year old Inspiron laptop).

I noticed that AVG's process VSMON.EXE was eating up a lot of CPU and when I disabled AVG, my usenet DL speed shot up to a healthy 2200KB/s, with just an occasional dip. I think VSMON must have been checking every connection for viruses etc - which obviously resulted in big problems with 10 or 15 parallel connections!

For anybody experiencing speed problems, and who uses AVG (especially the big upgrade a few months ago) it might be worth checking your connection using, say windows firewall to see if you get as much of a speed improvement as I did!

[SnoopZ]

I wouldn't use AVG if it was the only free antivirus available, not withthe current version anyway.

I recommend Avast as an alternative, but make sure you turn off scanning of newsgroups in the mail shield options as this makes for a smoother download.