Hi all, I'm having some computer problems, every time I use the internet it takes forever to load, which is weird considering my internet is now much faster. The only thing that has changed is the ISP, security etc is all currently the same. Could a flash cookie or something like that bog my computer down? Or could I have picked up something a lot nastier that my virus scan hasn't picked up?

Thanks!

The "only" thing that's changed is your ISP? Changing your ISP changes a whole lot - are you sure your connection isn't just slower now?

In any case, what's being slow? The actual transfer times, DNS lookup? A flash cookie would be, appropriately, only read by flash. They're just little files, they can't hurt you.

As for viruses, while they can hurt you, very few are built to cause you serious issues. Best case for a virus is that get gets in undetected and is then able to do what it wants - making it obvious it's there defeats the point. Contrary to popular belief, a virus is unlikely to seriously impact system performance.

My connection jumped from roughly 20ish mbs down and like 6-8 up to 30 mbs down and up. What's lagging is page refresh to the point that it just stops loading.

It hasn't done it so far after I installed betterprivacy on firefox just a few minutes ago, so that may have fixed it.