Recent studies have proved that the average person loses about five days every year waiting for pages and programs to load up on their computers – pretty depressing stuff isn’t it? The worst part of it all is how we’re supposed to be living in an age of epically powerful PCs and faster broadband than we’ll ever need, so why are we still moving at a snail’s pace more often than that?

A slow or broken Internet connection can drive any grown man to tears – especially if you’re paying good money for a top-end package. Despair not however as there are plenty of ways and means to improve things with a touch of DIY – all of which should be attempted before going postal on your ISP!

1. Test Your Speed
First up, make sure you do indeed have a problem by testing your Internet connection speed using any decent browser-based freebie sites (i.e. speedtest.net). If it comes back that all is as it should be, the problem is clearly with your hardware and not the actual connection. If it’s all wrong, your hardware might be fine and your ISP is to blame.

2. Turn Off Backgrounds Tasks
You’d be surprised just how badly a few background tasks here and there can slow down your Internet connection speed. So whatever OS you’re using, make your way in to the control panel for background tasks and get rid of any you don’t need – chances are there will be a few.

3. Disable Add-ons
The same also goes for add-ons in your browser too. No matter which browser you’re using, there will be all manner of add-ons doing their thing both right there on the page and behind the scenes to boot. Turn off any you don’t need by going into the browser’s settings and taking a look at what’s killing your connection.

5. Kill WiFi Hogs
Speaking of killing, it could be that one or more other Wi-Fi devices around the home are gobbling up more than their fair share of your bandwidth. There are also plenty of cordless devices like telephones that can mess up your Wi-Fi connections, so try killing the lot of them…temporarily, of course.

6. Clean Your Computer
Slow computers breed slow Internet connections, so if it’s looking like the connection itself isn’t to blame and your hardware seems solid enough, it could be a problem with your computer’s speed. Optimise your machine with a good clean-up top to bottom and see if this helps.

7. Try a Cable
Go old-school and connect your computer to your router by way of a physical cable – the best way of testing whether your connection or wireless signal is to blame for the poor service.

8. Rant
And finally, once you’ve been through all of the above and confirmed that you aren’t doing anything wrong, feel free to have a rant at your service provider. Chances are they’ll annoy you even more by asking you to turn your machine off and on to see if this works, but by having eliminated a variety of potential problems by going over the tips above, you’ll be in a better position to find the genuine cause of the problem.