Posted 04/17/09 at 12:30:00 PM by Justin Kerr

You are reading Maximum PC because you love to build, and tweak your rig. We will gladly spend hours trying to nudge a few extra clock cycles out of our CPU’s, but why do so many of us refuse to touch our network settings? The vast majority of users simply plug in their network cables, cross their fingers, and sacrifice an AOL CD to the gods who keep Conficker at bay. Truth be told, without going into too much depth up front, there is a really easy way to boost your surfing speed and it requires very little effort at all. This same tool gives you the ability to customize your internet experience further by creating URL shortcuts, or even filtering content, all without extra software.

The tool we are referring to is Domain Name System, or DNS for short. In a nutshell, DNS is your phone book for the internet. It helps translate a friendly internet domain like www.maximumpc.com, into IP address that our computer needs to find servers on the internet. Each time you visit a new website, a DNS query is issued in the background, and you’re none the wiser. Internet service providers supply DNS to all their customers, but these servers tend to be overpopulated, and certainly aren’t a priority to them because it’s difficult for the average user to measure performance. Power users are intimately familiar with how to benchmark raw connection speeds, but before that even becomes a factor, your machine needs IP address which is supplied by your DNS. Even if your smoking fast Fiber Optic connection can handle 18 Mbps, if  your ISP’s DNS server wastes several seconds looking up your favorite website, you connection may be sitting in limbo when you could be surfing instead.

Interested in finding out how to improve the responsiveness of your connection and learning more about your DNS options? Hit the jump to find out more.

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Posted 07/09/08 at 04:59:03 PM by Mark Edward Soper

Bad news for ZoneAlarm users running Windows XP: the MS08-037 security update for DNS (aka 951748) released Tuesday breaks ZoneAlarm and knocks XP users off the Internet. If you're running recent versions of ZoneAlarm on Windows XP, you should avoid the KB951748 update for now. Grab a list of workarounds (and now, solutions) here.

For what went wrong, and how to fix it if you've already been bitten, catch us after the break.

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