Speed up Internet browsing with Propel Accelerator
Posted on June 18, 2008 at 5:05 am
Looking for a way to speed up your Internet browsing? It is highly likely that many of you will remember using a dial-up Internet connection. Some of you may even still use one, especially those of you, who like me, live in a country where high speed broadband is just not readily available. I have spent the past two years using a GPRS EDGE connection via my cellular phone. Because of this I take any idea for increasing the speed of my surfing very seriously.
Several months ago I discovered Propel Accelerator, and I have to say it’s been a fantastically useful thing for me, and will surely help anybody else who suffers from an Internet connection slower than 512kbps. I had tried all sorts of registry tweaks, TCP/IP optimizers, and strange magic rituals performed at midnight which involved a dead chicken, to speed up my slug of an Internet connection.
Nothing really worked very well at all, until I found Propel. I must admit I was little dubious, mostly because Propel is a paid solution ($49 per year) and nothing else had worked so far, but as they offer a free trial, I gave it a try and was glad that I did.
Propel works by setting itself as a local proxy server, all of your browser traffic (except secure traffic served over HTTPS) is requested through it. What happens then, is that the Propel servers sitting on their fat and fast bandwidth, go and retrieve the page, it is then scanned for graphics and other heavy content, and is compressed before being sent to your browser and de-compressed locally. It actually works very well, check out these browsing statistics from the PC I am writing this post on.
Pretty impressive eh? Propel has saved me from needing to download about 60Mb of traffic, which represents a very serious time saving over my slow connection. I should point out that it will only accelerate your browsing and email collection, it won’t help with downloads or uploads and will not make applications like VOIP any faster.
Configuration is simple, in fact it really just works out of the box, there can be some degradation on the graphic content as it is compressed to use less bandwidth, but it is barely noticeable and easily lived with. Any image that you would like to see in full detail can be refreshed individually and sent without compression.
If you use Internet Explorer, then the dynamic imaging features of the browser are exploited, meaning a low res graphic is loaded first, then the resolution is built layer upon layer once the rest of the page has been rendered and bandwidth becomes available.
I have to say, even though this is a paid subscription service, it is a complete bargain. If I consider the hundreds of hours it has saved me over the past few months it is incredible value. If you are forced to use a slow Internet connection, give it a try, the one week free trial is fully featured.
This is a guest post by Mac Wheeler, a tech enthusiast.
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Gr8 artcile…i think it will definately help..there should be a download link for the application at the bottom of this post neways software website link is there lets seeif i can download it from the publisher website.
Your compressions stats are impressive. I had tried propel 2 or 3 years back and had found that Onspeed (www.onspeed.com) does a better job.
Maybe its time to propel out once again.
Thanks Pallab I had never heard of Onspeed before I will take a look at it, maybe I’ll do a comparative test and post the results.
This stats I posted are impressive yes, it really is a heck of a useful application for me, it’s saved me hundreds of hours.