Bye bye Smartbyte

[bungeejumper]

Well, I've gone and bought my new desktop computer - a Dell Inspiron 3268 with i5 processor and 8gb, which cost me a mighty £199 for an ex-display model. This particular machine was discontinued this year, I think, in favour of a higher specced model, but it seems triffic. Really very nippy, apart from one thing. The broadband speed wasn't good, even though it was in a good location and right next to another machine that was getting 21 mbps. In fact this one was struggling to make five!

Thanks to Google, the problem took only minutes to resolve. All Dell laptops and desktops (I think) are now shipped with a third party bloatware gizmo called Smartbyte, which is supposed to "improve streaming flow" or something like that. Well, it buggers other things up, apparently. And some say that it causes problems with VPNs - but since I have no idea anyway what a visible panty line is doing in my computer, I'll pass on that one.

Anyway, I took the advice to uninstall Smartbyte (and also killed the still-running routines in Task Manager), and blimey, my Speedtest reading immediately increased from 5 mbps to 21.5 mbps. Life is good.

Pass it on.

BJ