I work in the mortgage business, I’m self-employed, but work for a broker. We have Greenbow VPN, and when the VPN is off, and I go to download a file, PDF from an email, it takes around 30 seconds to give me an option for a folder to download to. Once it finds that folder, download is instant. This is frustrating, and it wasn’t an issue on my last old computer. The IT guy that set up my old computer passed away and the owner of my company set the VPN up himself, so I think the initial setup was bad.
I don’t have the VPN on all the time, it’s my computer, I’m 100% commission based.
My new computer is an ASUS Zenbook, super fast… this wasn’t an issue until the VPN was installed.
Thoughts on how to fix this?
Personally, I would backup any settings on the VPN client and then uninstall it. If that solves the issue, then you have your answer.
If that doesn’t solve it, then it sounds like maybe you have a poor choice of DNS servers set by DHCP on your local network (or by some malware on your PC) and when you activate the vpn connection they’re getting overridden by a better choice temporarily. I would try to manually set my DNS to cloudflare (1.1.1.1) to test with the VPN off.
If that still doesn’t do it, then you probably have some other routing issue like multiple layers of NAT and need somebody with basic networking knowledge to look at your router configurations.
It’s a new computer, he installed the VPN software and this happened. I thought it was the computer and after hours of tech support with Asus, I did a full factory reset. After that, the computer worked great until he installed the VPN. It’s 100% the VPN install.
It could certainly be. No idea why anyone would use a proprietary closed source IPsec based VPN these days when you have wireguard providers available.
The software could be just poorly written, or actually malicious and somehow it changes your OS network settings so that it’s intentionally degrading performance when the VPN is not running (eg, hard-coding in a bad DNS).
I would show the boss what it’s doing and then fully uninstall it. If that doesn’t fix it, you might have to factory reset your OS again. Then, if you really need an office VPN still, talk to him about setting up Wireguard, which is faster, more secure and opensource. Wireguard server software is built-in to many brands of routers (eg Asus, TPLink, Gl-iNet, etc) by default these days, and the client software is open source and free for your phones, laptop, etc
Greenbow is a well known VPN software. When I have it turned on, everything is fine. Once I turn off the VPN, the computer can’t find where to save files. I’ve mapped where to the files should go.
We can go on for days about the amount of times that good software has turned into spyware or malware when companies sell out or start losing market cap. But if you’re happy keep using it.
Again if your internet speed slows down when the vpn is deactivated, the first thing to check would be your DNS settings.
I never said my internet speeds slow down, not sure where you read that. I said, when I receive a file and want to download it, like a pdf or an image, it takes around 30 seconds searching where to download the file WHEN the VPN is turned off. I have no choice on whether or not to use Greenbow, it’s the company I work for that requires it.
The “save as” dialogue with most browsers for Windows typically happens after the file url has been resolved. A delay in the dialogue is often due to slow resolution of the URI request.
If this is not your case, then it could be many things - a lag in Defender scanning the target directory, custom view filters in Explorer, or even a bad a Explorer extension. Greenbow MSI appears to do some taskbar MenuItem integration, so this could be your issue. Good luck.