whys my computer slow?

Lay of the pron.

 

Upload is usually much slower than download on cable modems.

 

No, even computers with much older hardware than yours have no problems with video. Your problems are totally because you are stealing your access. This means you are totally at the mercy of how much throughput is provided to your branch of cable and what they decide to do to your modem.

Either they don't yet know about your modem, and the bandwidth you were getting before is now given to a paying customer living close to you, or they do know about your modem and decided to make you suffer enough to want to pay for cable without making you want to quit the internet altogether.

 

It's interesting as as far as I know, just selling the modem to a friend would not work over here. The MAC address is cross-referenced to their locations over here, meaning that unless you give the modem to a neighbor or at least someone living very near you, this would likely never work.

 

Yeah it might work for cable TV, but certainly not for the internet, be it DSL or able, in Europe.

 

Then you should have paid up. At the most, it's probably around $35.

 

internet companies use it to track down theft of their services.

 

inside your computer. like i said, it's like a VIN. it should be next to your hard drive.

 

Er.... WHAT??

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address

In computer networking, a Media Access Control address (MAC address) is a unique identifier assigned to most network adapters or network interface cards (NICs) by the manufacturer for identification

I think you've got a cable modem, haven't you? if so, it will have the mac address encoded in it somewhere I'd imagine but as to how you'd find out I wouldn't know not having a cable modem.

Did a quick google, (if it's still no good), and found this...

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robin.d.h.walker/cmtips/macaddr.html#machfc

However, I'm not sure what finding the mac address is going to tell you.