Comast Hi-Speed Probs with Safari and Entourage

[jspbg4]

Folks - Newbie here so pls excuse any early errors.
Using Comcast digital cable high speed internet access for the last year or so. However, in the past month, have noticed a dramatic drop in connection speed when using both Safari and MS Entourage. Both programs recently updated through auto-update features (but connection speed problem appeared before upgrades).

In Safari, pages take much longer to load than in the past and never seem to completely load. By "never seem to completely load" I mean the spinning "wheel" in Safari continues spinning even when about 95% of web page is loaded and blue "status bar" in web page address line never quite completely moves to 100%. It seems Safari is stuck on some last bit of loading the web page.

In Entourage, automatic email checks are about 50-50 successful v. unsuccessful. A recent (and fairly common) error message in Entourage for failure is "Connection to the server failed or was dropped. Error: -17895" Sends of emails also take quite long (even for a simple text email).

Checking my Bandwith speed via a CNET Bandwith Meter, I often get results of less than dial up speed. While this may explain the slow downloading of web pages and slow sending of emails, this does not seem to answer the question failure to completely load a web page in Safari.

Thoughts about trying to get back to my old high speed and eliminate these problems are most appreciated.

Using a PB G4 (purchased late 2003) running OS X 10.3.9 Comcast service is in the downtown Washington D.C. area.

[Osmosis]

Sounds like you have more than one issue going on. 1st off I would use a more reliable bandwidth meter such as "www.speakeasy.net/speedtest".
If in fact your speed is down that would explain why you have problems on both Safari and Entourage.

Good luck...Rod

[bobw]

Shut down the computer, unplug the power to the modem for a few minutes, then plug it back in, wait for alll the lights. Power up the machine and try this speed test site;

http://www.giganews.com/test_connect.html

If you still have bad speed, call Comcast.