Hi,

Whenever i am watching videoclips (youtube, bbc) the buffering is horrendous. I am running windows7 on a laptop with 4gb ram and flash player v10. Also running avast anti-virus, zone alarm firewall and avast anti-virus. Use CCleaner to get rid of any rubbish. My broadband speed result (tested on brpadbandspeedchecker) is 2mb download, 243kb upload rather than the advertised 8mb.

Any suggestions on what it might be? Broadband speed? Not enough ram? Security settings?

Thanks in advance.

Make sure you advertised speed does not say "up to" 8Mb.

Did you used to get better speeds?

Yes you are right; advertised speed is up to 8mb. Actual speed has always been around 2. Didn't used to have these probs.

Well, you could check another computer on your network to see if it gets the same speeds. If so, then you know it is your network/internet connection and not your computer.

I note you said, "...running avast anti-virus, zone alarm firewall and avast anti-virus." Was listing Avast twice just a brain f*rt or did you mean something like AVG anti-virus and Avast? If listing Avast twice was just a mistake, then no problem. But if using two AV solutions, that is not good or necessary. At best, it just wastes system resources and provides no significant improvement in security. At worst, the two anti-virus programs can cause conflicts as each wonders what the other is up to, like two dogs guarding the same bone.

Sorry, my mistake. Should have written ad-aware instead of the 2nd avast!

Okay, that should not be a problem. Then it would be good to try another computer on your network.

before upgrading anything I would rather cleaning your OS. try cleaning using ccleaner, avast and malwarebytes. Then remove all found infections.