Twice a year or so my wife will breathlessly tell me: “The Internet is down.”
My first reaction is that I am sitting on one heck of a news story. Civilization as we know it would slow to a crawl if the Internet itself stopped working. But I know what she really means: Our DSL connection isn’t working.

Compared to the old dial-up days, most of us have it easy. I’m not just talking about speed. The connection is much more reliable nowadays. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the connection is much more crucial to the way we live. It connects us to work, to school, to our online banking and bill paying.

Luckily, there are some simple ways to remain well-connected. Today we’ll talk about what you can do at home to — in many cases — avoid that dreaded conversation with your Internet provider’s technical support staff. If you’ve ever suffered through that experience, you’ll know how welcome these do-it-yourself tips can be.

Let’s start with the most basic trick I know. It’s embarrassingly simple but enormously effective: Turn the modem off, let it sit for a moment, and then turn it on.

Here’s why that often works wonders when it comes to your Internet connection. Modems ccasionally lose synchronization. When that happens, the Web unravels, e-mail stops working. The on-screen messages after that failure tell you what you already know and offers brainy suggestions such making sure all the cables are plugged in (which actually is a pretty good thing to do). But I’ve never seen an on-screen message that offers the most obvious fix: Turn off the modem and any router connected to it, let it sit, then turn it back on.

Let me make up a statistic here, this on/off trick will get your connection going again about 60 percent of the time. It forces the modem in your home to renew its acquaintance with the equipment at your Internet provider.

If that doesn’t work, then do spend a moment to check cable and power connections. Not long ago I was able to show my own incompetence when we lost our home connection. I tried most of the tricks that I knew — as well as a few that I didn’t — with no success. I was on the verge of calling my provider when I noticed that the panel lights on a hub (a device simpler but similar to a router) were out. Turns out my wife had moved a paper shredder to a new location and jogged the wiring behind the desk enough to pull the power connection loose on the hub. Had I followed my own advice about checking connection, the fix would have taken 10 seconds rather than 10 minutes.
We’ve talked about connections that don’t work. But many times, the connection will work do it slowly.

Keep in mind that, just as is true on the interstates, sometimes traffic to a Web site gets so heavy that things slow to a crawl. Besides that, the Internet itself slows down at times. If you want to check the condition of the Net itself here is a site that will let you do that for any area of the world: http://www.internettrafficreport.com/

Avoid tinkering at the first sign of slowness. But if the slow connection persists across all sites for several days, then the problem may be in your house.
Possible causes include interference from other gadgets — even a malfunctioning outdoor light, dimmer switch or electrical problems can spark a slowdown. Kinks in the ethernet cable can also create a roadblock. The cable reacts poorly to a very sharp bend.

Experiment by turning off suspect devices and checking the cable for kinks.
It would be wrong to write about technology without throwing in a few mysterious initials. So here you have it: MTU: maximum transmission unit.

Read this but, please, don’t try to change any settings unless you spend much more time learning about it than reading a few sentences in a newspaper column.
To understand MTU, you need to know that data travels on the Internet in packets. If you send an e-mail to your Aunt Sally, the note is broken down into bite-size chunks, and these are sent out in a stream. You can set your computer to adjust the size of each packet. Windows Vista tries to do all adjusting that for you, earlier versions of Windows sometimes need manual tweaking (that’s true for Vista too, it’s just a different process).

A faulty MTU setting can slow down the transmission of data. I’ll offer a couple of Web pages that explain why that is and how to change things — even with Vista. But, as I said, consider this a bit of education rather than a how-to lesson.
Here’s a site that discusses MTU and Windows Vista: http://tinyurl.com/6zkr34 and here’s a Web site from the United Kingdom that does a fine job explaining how MTU works: http://www.orangeproblems.co.uk/kitz/

That’s it for today. Maybe the next you hear those famous words, “The Internet is down,” you’ll be able to do what even Al Gore sometimes can’t ... make it work again.