Google seems to be getting everywhere. They are there in just about every corner of our online life, and now they have taken a step further by launching Google Public DNS. Google Public DNS aims at making the web faster for you, by using a high speed, public DNS server. Here’s what DNS does in simple words :
Say you type in the Wikipedia.org in your browser window. The DNS then converts the URL you typed into machine readable IP address and returns it to you. Only after the actual IP of the website is determined does the webpage begin loading for you.
OpenDNS has long since been considered the pioneer in the making the web faster by giving users a free, fast public DNS server with servers spread around the globe to reduce latency.
I’ve been using OpenDNS for the past two years for my needs, and needless to say the experience has been quite good. Not to forget the increase in speed while browsing the web. But today with the release of Google’s own DNS solution I was curious to see if it could beat the already fast service that OpenDNS provides.
So I ran my own tests sitting here in India, using this script by Manu over at TechSutra.
#!/bin/sh for i in "lifehacker.com" "facebook.com" "dailyapps.net" "reddit.com" "google.com" "bbc.co.uk" "microsoft.com" "yahoo.com" "ebay.com" do for j in "4.2.2.2" "8.8.4.4" "208.67.222.222" do echo $j $i `dig @$j $i | grep Query | awk -F ":" '{print $2}'` done done
And here are my results :
photo credit: jpctalbot
I’m not a Windows Vista fan, but even then everyone at my home uses Windows Vista, while I dual boot with OSX on my Hackintosh.. I’ve used XP before and for some reason I always felt that Internet speeds on Vista were comparably slower than on OSX, and more so even Windows XP.
Considering it was quite slower than what I used to get on XP, I realized that Vista was doing something extra that made my internet connection slow down. After a bit of investigation and a bit of googling I found the solution.
Before I give the solution, let me explain the problem in a bit more detail… It all comes down to Vista’s “Auto Tuning” feature. Turns out that this feature isn’t compatible with many routers and networking devices(including mine). Means the feature that was supposed to be a boon turned itself into some sort of a bane.
Anyways here’s what you need to do turn off the Auto Tuning feature on Vista..
