Basic information for increasing your www experience

Most important TIP of all! Avoid the world wide wait. Most of the time (after you finish downloading a page) your modem is doing nothing . Keep it busy. Open a few windows and click ahead on links to start the large files coming in. Your computer keeps these file in memory (assuming you have not disabled your disk cache functionality). This way you start loading the next page before you need it. Because data is coming down in packets you can receive multiple files almost at once. If you already have it in your cache you will not have to wait! More on this later. If you have to wait a long time to connect.. The Network or Server may be busy . If you are using a modem and a phone line it's crowded out there. Late at night or early in the morning is usaully faster. Same for weekends.. If the pictures take a long time to appear.. You may have a slow connection, the networks busy, or the server is overloaded...or they are just big files! To speed things up you can turn off your auto load image function. You can then click on the icons for individual images to see them. Set background to default (no image). Adjust your cache so your computer keeps images in memory. Allocate more RAM to your browser. Try different browsers to see which is fastest on your system. Open another window and keep surfing while a big page loads! (Do not launch another copy of your browser, just another window!) This is a great technique for any site. You can even have multiple sites open at once. You are only limited by your RAM available. You will however take up more bandwidth so try not to abuse this. Like having 16 windows open at once. Internal links in the MAYA site have parenthesis behind the links indicating the size of the page. Some graphics are re-used so the download time will be shorter.

If the pictures (or backgrounds) look funny.. Set your monitor to thousands of colors or more. (256 colors is not enough to do these images justice.) It's worth losing resolution to improve color depth. Most images are JPEG with millions of colors. New Photos are in GIF format. Text is hard to read.. Adjust your font and background color in your browser. You can override the color format if you like. Isn't the web wonderful? You can even set your background color and lose the big colorful backgrounds (you will however utterly destroy all the hard work we put into making them). Learn how to customize your browser. You can also make the fonts bigger or smaller and change the style. Navigation is everything.. Bookmark (favorites in Explorer) pages you want to return to.Use your browsers back button. Also holding down the mouse will pop up menus on the cool browsers, (you are using a recent release aren't you?). Open another browser and click ahead on large pages. You can read while the images are loading. Instead of cool movies, VR scenes and audio you see a message concerning QuickTime or Plug-ins.. You need to have QuickTime . Any new download from Netscape or Microsoft should have this as standard by now. upgrade that browser. If you are stuck with what you got..can't help you. Instead of a picture I get a broken icon...or an x Possible Server trouble. Try again. The image is no longer where it should be on the server. These things happen. 404 error message. Try again. Server trouble. Out of date link. Try refreshing your page (reload). Shut down your browser and restart it. Nothings perfect. Send feedback if possible. Every effort is made to maintain this site.