Cactus TurboNet Newsletter July 2007       

Billing Made Easier

If you don’t like paying bills, let us make it easier for you.  We can automatically charge your credit card monthly, quarterly or yearly for your Internet service.  Just phone us to set it up.

Don’t throw away that Router!

A very common complaint for high-speed Internet users is that a router “seizes up” and the customer must re-start it frequently.  If this happens to you, don’t blame the router.  Replacing it probably won’t help.  Here’s why:

Routers contain memory very much like a computer’s RAM.  This memory holds a table which includes the IP address of every computer on your side of the router.  It also holds the IP addresses of all the computers out on the Internet which your computers have recently tried to contact.

If one of your computers has a virus or trojan which is spread by direct Internet contact, that infected computer will be trying to reach out and touch thousands of other computers out on the Internet to infect them.  This will fill up the memory which holds the router’s table, and your Internet access will grind to a halt.  When you re-start the router, everything seems fine until the table fills up and your router quits again.

This problem can also be caused by peer-to-peer file-sharing programs like Limewire or eDonkey or Bit-Torrent.  With any peer-to-peer system, the faster your Internet access, the more computers will try to download from you.  If your Internet is fast enough, the IP addresses of these computers can fill up your router’s table just as a virus does.  Your router quits, and you have to re-start it to free up the memory.

To remove most peer-to-peer programs from your computer, go into the Control Panel and choose Add or Remove Programs.  Look for and remove the programs from the list.  To help you figure out which programs to remove, we have a list of the most common ones.  Go to http://www.turbonet.com/FileSharing.asp and click on Removing Peer-to-Peer Programs.

Note that we’ve seen trouble removing Limewire.  You will sometimes go through the procedure above, thinking it’s gone, and it’s still there.  And some don’t show up on the Add/Remove list at all.

If you are behind a router and have trouble removing a peer-to-peer program, turning off Universal Plug n Play in your router (then rebooting it) will usually stop the uploading.  Not always.

Virus and Trojan removal ranges from easy to impossible.  Try updating your current anti-virus program and running a complete scan.  There’s also a good, free antivirus at http://free.GRIsoft.com, called AVG.  Avast is another good one.  Don’t leave more than one antivirus program actively scanning things, but installing a second one temporarily is fine.

Tell your Friends!

As always, if someone mentions your name when they sign up with us for Internet, they’ll get a free month of service, and you’ll get a free month as well.  And it really makes us feel good that people will recommend us.  Thank you!