First off, ditch Internet Explorer. Horribly slow.
Secondly, get an older version of Netscape or Opera running. Turn off as many of the fancy options as you can stand to streamline the process/download time.
Thirdly, and this is the killer for IE - if you do some sleuthing, you’ll notice that the page lags trying to send data back and forth to google.alalytics and a couple of other marketing sites. If these sites are down or clogged or whatever, in IE, YOUR CONNECTION STOPS FOR 60 SECONDS UNTIL IT MANUALLY TIMES OUT! If one of the image-hosting sites is also clogged/jammed/woot’s computers can’t serve it up, THE SAME THING HAPPENS WHILE IT WAITS FOR THAT IMAGE/PIECE OF DATA.
You can blame Microsoft for this piece of genius programming. ME? I’ve set Netscape to disable auto-loading images, disable active controls, and everything else that is animated or scripted. Very fast, if crude looking. But it’s fast and reliable.
The obvious solution is to disable those sites so that your computer auto-bounces DNS to them. Doing these three things - I get an average load-time of 10-15 seconds even during this woot-off.
I personally have no beef with Woot - it’s their right to collect marketing data internally or have banners or whatever else they need to generate money and figure out what we really are more interested in - it’s part of business.
The problem, though, is that if one banner ad site is clogged, if there is a glut of activity that they can’t serve it up fast enough, or it’s just plain down/missing DNS - the browser jams.
Here’s a basic primer on DNS lookup blocking. There are huge lists that are propigated via the net - literally a hundred thousand entries for some - that block most offending spam and mal-ware sites.
Of course, it will tend to make your web-pages look like junk or slightly mis-formatted, which is why I do this mostly with Netscape or some other browser that I use for quick-and-dirty browsing. disabling animations and auto-loading images is also a good idea. I’ve even seen people running this from time to time:
This is the ORIGINAL browser. NO graphics, no anything - just blindingly fast text-only.
Opera and others have configurable timeouts, IIRC - so it can go from a headache to a small blip as it gives up and continues.
Of course, it won’t possibly work with Woot’s ordering forms, but for brute-force gotta get in and see it on my wi-fi/cellphone/modem connection, it’s great.
EDIT: THi is abouyt LYNX. Opera works great with Woot!.
Download, back-up your original hosts file, and install.
Then open the resulting file in notepad.
After the 127.0.0.1 ad-doubleclick.net lines, add the following:
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
Save and restart your browser. Enjoy - lag is gone. Google is lagging under heavy loads via woot’s proxy/feed for as long as a minute or more. This hosts file also blows up ads on toms hardware, edmunds, and half a dozen other sites - the banners are just gone.
Damn, that really seems to work… well especially with this no-traffic, dead-woodchuck-stinking-up-the-porch, woot-killer of a vid capture device.
I was using the firefox adblock extension but that only stops the browser from rendering whatever items you block or running whatever scripts. That helped some from not running the google anylitic… anilyti… anility … the script in question. oh, and nothing against Mathew’s podcasts, but I didn’t see the point in having to render the SWF player object with every refresh.
