Safari Slowdowns Again

Question

Hello,
For the past few days, I've been getting a real slowdown in Safari 3.2.1 again - I was getting this on my old iMac G5 running Mac OS X 10.4.11 after upgrading it to 10.4.11 and to Safari 3.2.1 in early December. That iMac G5 is gone now.
I got a new iMac 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo about three weeks ago and Safari has been fine up until a few days ago. I go to sites and they take forever to load. Then I empty the cache or do a reset safari and try again and sometimes, it works ok for a while and then back to the same thing - websites take forever to load.
It's not our network - our PBG4/667 running Mac OS X 10.4.11 and Safari 3.2.1 seems to work fine all the time. It's just my new Intel iMac that has this problem. The only thing that has changed in the past few days is that I installed iLife 09 and it automatically installed QuickTime 7.6 (from the previous 7.5.5). Nothing else has changed on my new iMac. I still haven't installed the iLife Media Browser Update 2 that shows up in my software update but I can't see how that would affect or resolve this problem anyway.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to what may be going on and how to resolve this problem?
Thanks very much,
Gerard

Answer 1

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220
are correct.
The following usually works on both Tiger and Leopard:
(First, if yours is an Intel Mac, check that Safari is not running in Rosetta, which is enough to slow it to a crawl.)
Adding DNS codes to your Network Settings, should gives good results in terms of speed-up:
Open System Preferences/Network. Double click on your connection type, or select it in the drop-down menu. Click on TCP/IP and in the box marked 'DNS Servers' enter the following two numbers:
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220
Click on Apply Now and close the window.
Restart Safari, and repair permissions.
If that didn't do it, then try this as well:
Empty Safari's cache (from the Safari menu), then close Safari.
Go to Home/Library/Safari and delete the following files:
form values
download.plist
Then go to Home/Library/Preferences and delete
com.apple.Safari.plist
Repair permissions (in Disk Utility).
Start up Safari again, and things should have improved.
Less likely, but possible, is that the slowness is caused by a Trojan such as the one called 'DNSChanger' or 'OSZ.RSPlug', which can alter the DNS settings of your network connection. This particular Trojan can be inadvertently installed if you have come across certain Quicktime movies where got a window stating that you have to download and install a particular codec in order to see the video.
If you have agreed to that installation, your system can be infected and your DNS settings altered, which results in your system using the wrong DNS servers, which can slow web surfing to a crawl.
This can be fixed by downloading and running a freeware utility called DNSChanger Removal Tool which you can download from here:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/33696
Once you have run that utility you have to re-boot your Mac, then reset Safari, and re-enter your DNS settings in System Preferences/Network.