Thursday, January 30, 2020

Got some maintenance done

I spent much of today doing updates for the laptop.

I had noticed that, over the past day or two, the internet was going very slowly.  To the point of uselessness, actually.  My first instinct, when that happens, is to assume the proivder is either having issues or is intentionally throttling the bandwidth.  That wasn't the case this time, though.

I use the laptop at the edge of the router's wireless range, and I've got a range booster between here and there to make up the difference.  The problem with a range booster is that it lowers the top speed of your computer's internet connection.  And if something else slows that speed down even more, than it can cripple your connection altogether.

Well, that "something else" comes in the form of Windows updates that happen in the background without telling you.  Even when set to "metered connection," it's still a burden on your bandwidth.  Nothing was loading, not even the simplest web pages.

So I set my laptop up on a tv tray just a few feet from the router--where the signal is as strong as it gets--and did all the updates I could.

My internet speed is now back to normal.

I also ran Malwarebytes and quarantined a thing.  Not sure when or how that thing got there.  But it's in the naughty-code cage now.

To paraphrase what's-her-name from Poltergiest, "this computer is now clean."

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