I have been using Usenet Explorer for about six months, then about two months ago my speeds dramatically dropped from being my cap (around 650kb/s) to 150kb/s and below. I then switched newsgroups from Agent Premium News to Giganews thinking they were to blame. Well the speeds stayed the same, so I've uninstalled and reinstalled Usenet Explorer and reformatted my computer to no avail.
So I then switched newsreaders to Newsbin and my speeds are back where they should be, though I don't like the program. Is there anyway for me to get Usenet Explorer to function properly again?
Slow d/l speeds only with UE
first ensure you don't mess somewhere kbytes and kbits in case the cap is imposed from the outside like your ISP.
do you mean headers or article bodies download speed? i guess you mean any kind of tasks.
did you set bandwidth in properties->tasks->bandwidth? or maybe scheduler is enabled with bandwidth set?
do you have any third party firewall or antivirus? did you try to disable or if it doesn't help to remove it completely and check the download speed then?
also as to third party you may try to uncheck "keep alive" in properties->general, it makes bugs in third party programs to be less likely triggered although better to remove them if they have negative effect on the download speed or cause other errors. e.g. kaspersky some recent release caused system crashes (at least in vista) with the keep-alive option checked since apparently kaspersky wasn't able to handle connections which outlive the worker thread life span.
in short unless you changed bandwidth settings it is most likely third party driver related.
the difference with newsbin, i remember newsbin was using rather trivial approach when a fixed number of threads is created on the program start and are kept constantly running, UE doesn't limit the number of tasks but it means threads are constantly created and closed but connections may outlive creating them thread. so mostly the difference as to third party driver potential bugs is the keep-alive option and unchecking it may help. also you may try to set the total number of tasks to 8 or whatever is the thread number in newsbin, e.g. if you run 30 tasks your third party program like antivirus may have affect performance heavier as the number of network threads is rising.
but since we are talking about bugs - if unchecking keep alive doesn't help - first disabling and then if unsuccessful - uninstall of the potential culprits to verify the source of the problem are needed.
normally since processor usage is always around zero and all kinds of tasks are heavily optimized UE can draw all available bandwidth even on header tasks, like 20mpbs or higher speed connections, the bottleneck is the hard drive writing speed maybe.
do you mean headers or article bodies download speed? i guess you mean any kind of tasks.
did you set bandwidth in properties->tasks->bandwidth? or maybe scheduler is enabled with bandwidth set?
do you have any third party firewall or antivirus? did you try to disable or if it doesn't help to remove it completely and check the download speed then?
also as to third party you may try to uncheck "keep alive" in properties->general, it makes bugs in third party programs to be less likely triggered although better to remove them if they have negative effect on the download speed or cause other errors. e.g. kaspersky some recent release caused system crashes (at least in vista) with the keep-alive option checked since apparently kaspersky wasn't able to handle connections which outlive the worker thread life span.
in short unless you changed bandwidth settings it is most likely third party driver related.
the difference with newsbin, i remember newsbin was using rather trivial approach when a fixed number of threads is created on the program start and are kept constantly running, UE doesn't limit the number of tasks but it means threads are constantly created and closed but connections may outlive creating them thread. so mostly the difference as to third party driver potential bugs is the keep-alive option and unchecking it may help. also you may try to set the total number of tasks to 8 or whatever is the thread number in newsbin, e.g. if you run 30 tasks your third party program like antivirus may have affect performance heavier as the number of network threads is rising.
but since we are talking about bugs - if unchecking keep alive doesn't help - first disabling and then if unsuccessful - uninstall of the potential culprits to verify the source of the problem are needed.
normally since processor usage is always around zero and all kinds of tasks are heavily optimized UE can draw all available bandwidth even on header tasks, like 20mpbs or higher speed connections, the bottleneck is the hard drive writing speed maybe.