It has been nearly a week since I am having slow loading problem on certain websites. During the day, it is still not too bad as I can visit the sites that I normally do. But when it reaches at night, I can’t even sign in to Windows Live Messenger, can’t login to my Adsense to check my earnings, can’t login to online banking to pay my bills, and searching in Google takes forever to load the searched results! Luckily I do not have problems accessing my own website which is hosted in US.
Streamyx slow problem
What the heck is going on with our Malaysian Internet Service Provider TM Net Streamyx? Whenever there are problems, it takes weeks for them to fix it. Come on, you are an ISP and you should hire really professional people, and not some n00bs that does trial and error. You should also change your mascot from blue colored hippo to a snail! Well enough of the rant. I am here to solve problems and not be a cry baby.

If you’re in Malaysia and getting really slow connections on certain websites during this period and also in future, here is a solution that you can try.

The reliability of our ISP is very important because no matter what, we’ll need to go through them first before able to surf the web. If they provide us with crappy and unstable connections, it is still not the end of the world because we can try to use VPN or open proxies. I have a WiTopia VPN account but it is also slow maybe because the server is located in US and our ISP is (always) having connectivity problems with international links.

I was browsing Malaysia’s very popular LowYat forum and found a thread that reports a very fast open proxy. By setting our browser to use the open proxy, a lot of websites started to load REALLY fast.

Here are the steps to set our browser to use the open proxy. For Mozilla Firefox browser, go to Tools > Options > Advanced > Network tab > click Settings button on Connection, select Manual proxy configuration and enter the HTTP Proxy as 219.93.178.162 with the port 3128. Check Use this proxy server for all protocols.
Firefox proxy setting

For Internet Explorer, go to Tools > Internet Options > Connections tab > click LAN Settings button > check Use a proxy server for your LAN (These settings will not apply to dial-up or VPN connections). Enter the address as 219.93.178.162 with the port 3128.
Internet Explorer proxy setting

Please take note that visiting blogspot URL using Firefox with 219.93.178.162 proxy gives me a 500 Server Error with the message “The following error occurred: [code=CACHE_FILL_OPEN_FILE] An internal error prevented the object from being sent to the client and cached. Try again later. Please contact the administrator.”
Firefox 500 Server Error

As for Internet Explorer, you’ll get HTTP 500 Internal Server Error with the message “The website cannot display the page. Most likely causes:The website is under maintenance. The website has a programming error.” When you get such error and need to access that website, you’d have to set your browser not to use the open proxy or use another open proxy. I found another open proxy (IP:219.93.175.67 Port:3128) which is also fast and able to load a lot of websites. If you’re using Firefox, there is one very useful Firefox add-on called Multiproxy Switch which you can use to easily switch between multiple proxy configurations.

Other than having problems loading some websites, it is nearly impossible for me to connect to my Windows Live Messenger at night. I kept on trying to connect and got a total of 3 different error codes “80072efd, 81000306, 80048820 with extended error code 80048439″.

MSN Connect Problem
To solve this problem, open up the browser, set it to use the open proxy and go to http://webmessenger.msn.com/ or http://www.meebo.com/ to login to our MSN account and use the web based messenger. Rest assured that both of these websites encrypts your login credentials with SSL. If you’ve set your Internet Explorer to use the proxy, your MSN should be able to connect because Windows Live Messenger uses the default connection setting from IE.

I wouldn’t advice you to simply login to any websites especially online banking sites using the open proxy. Although online banking websites has SSL and will encrypt your username and password, I still wouldn’t want to risk my bank account being compromised. Remember, this is a temporary solution until our ISP TM Net Streamyx get things right again.

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