It's difficult to be really objective about this. Part of my problem is having gone from dialup to Comcast broadband about six months ago. That was supposed to improve my speed by a factor of at least 20 or something, but it seemed more like 4. There's great variability in how fast these pages load. I never sit here with a stopwatch, but oftentimes I'd say they load in two to three seconds; I like that. About 10 to 20 percent of the time it takes fifteen seconds or more, and when that happens I close out the site and do something else. The variation in speed might have to do with how many other people in the vicinity are using the service. I'm afraid that as more and more people use broadband, and use it intensively for video downloads, etc., the networks will be slowed. Then the ISP's will be promoting a new premium service for additional fees. The ads/surveys/etc. have been tolerable over the past six months. The worst were those "video ads" that I couldn't get rid of, blocked all the site content, and would follow down the page with the scroll. When I got those, the only solution was to exit, cursing. And I don't see that triangular survey one anymore that would shoot in from the left.

Well, I'm not surprised that it's a bit slow on my home computer (older, hand me down computers, as it were). But today it was noticeably slow on my office computer which is fast & state of the art. I actually gave up trying to click into C&S something at the end of the business day, it never finished & I gave up. I don't recalll having had that happen before ... hum ... gremlins? I guess they're still working on the system, or maybe their servers. I DO see the caution/disclaimer about they're working on stuff IS back up again. Hrmphhhhhhhh (today's version of Grrrrrrrrrr)

Oh absolutely you need to do those other updates, adobe and java are so important to keep updated, the worst infections we see these days come from not having updated those items. For flash you must install it on each of the browsers on your pc, there's a special version for IE, and the non Ie version for the others like firefox and chrome etc, if you need help with any of these please ask, but by all means do those updates as soon as they come out. Be sure you only have the latest version of java get rid of the old versions. When they put out updates it is almost always due to a security issue.

It's been happening to me off and on the past few days. Also started seeing ads again out of the blue. Had to log in the other day and when I did the in-text links were back. Quickly scrambled to disable those irritating things!