I've been a Google fan for a number of years now, but in the last few months - the services that I use are becoming so slow, unreliable - simply unbearable now.
Google Mail, PicassaWeb (online), Pages, Sites, Documents, Reader - they are all extremely slow after a few minutes of use. Half the time my page request is never actioned - so I have to hit F5 to refresh the whole Web Application.
Digsby is able to tell me when I receive a new email almost instantly, so that works ok. But actually opening Gmail.com is a painful experience now. My Nokia N96 is able to use the Mobile Gmail app ok - but that has it's own frustrations. Every link I click brings up a Google version of the page, divided into a number of pages. Or it loads a page saying that the page will not be reformatted - click Here to continue. No options to completely disable it - I just want the original page in it's original PC format.
I am accessing these services on different computers, behind different networks, and have even used different browsers. It's all the same. I can be on my fast home gaming PC, on my Dad's home PC, on my work laptop at work, on my work laptop on a train using my N96 Internet connection. Slow and unreliable is the result. I've also tried disabling Google Labs with no change.
I'm thinking of moving over to my seldom used Zoho free account. I haven't wasted much time in the Google Discussion groups, since that requires me to sign up to a whole discussion area where I either receive tons of emails about each updated thread, or no emails at all. I already have a gmail filter to delete all Google Groups emails from a previous attempt to ask something.
Have you experience the same issues? Are there any known fixes or malware that directly attack this? My work laptop (XP Pro SP3) has Symantec Endpoint Protection 11, and my home PC (Vista Ultimate x64) has Comodo Internet Security. I use IE7 mainly with the IE&Pro addon, and have used Chrome a few times on occasion.