To make your experience of bbc.co.uk as enjoyable and useful as possible, we use the latest technologies across a wide range of media such as audio, video, animation and interactive games.

For easy-to-follow advice about technical issues click on the relevant subject below. For other help subjects look in the left/right-hand columns.

1. Making pages load more quickly
2. Watching video, listening to live radio or sound clips
3. Getting games, animated movies or 3D pictures to work
4. Getting a website address to work

The speed of your connection to the internet will affect the time it takes to load webpages. Most pages on bbc.co.uk will work very well on a dial-up connection (ie. through your phone line) but you may find that pages rich in multimedia elements, eg. video or games, will take longer to download.

Download times also vary depending on the number of people visiting the site. With very high demand our servers may slow down a little. Network congestion may occur when major news stories are breaking on the site.

Our Webwise guide has advice about ways to speed up your internet connection and also information about broadband.

There are many different internet browsers available, which all work in slightly different ways.

bbc.co.uk is built and tested carefully so that it works best in the most commonly used browsers, but we also try to make all our pages work in older and less common browsers wherever possible.

Most audio and video content on bbc.co.uk uses RealPlayer, although some is available in other formats as well. There's a free version of the RealPlayer software available so you won't need to pay anything extra to access clips on this site.

Follow this link for a step-by-step guide to downloading RealPlayer.

For more advice, please visit our Audio & video help page.

Some areas of bbc.co.uk contain interactive elements such as animated movies, clickable guides and games, which may require a plug-in or other software in order to work.

There are free version of all of these pieces of software so you will never have to pay extra to use bbc.co.uk.

Usually, there will be a prominent link to download the plug-in on the page that uses it. If not, you can use the links below to download some of the most common ones, making sure that you select the free version:

• Download Shockwave
• Download Flash Player
• Download Quicktime
• Download Adobe Reader

When entering the address of a site manually into the address box of your browser please ensure that it contains:

• www. first
• lower case text only
• no spaces or illegal characters

If you find an address on bbc.co.uk that doesn't work, look for the site in our A-Z index. If you find a broken link, please contact the webmaster.

bbc.co.uk is constantly updated to provide relevant information. As a result you might find that some pages are moved or archived and their addresses changed. Whilst we try to adjust links, you might still find some that return an error. To find out if a site has been changed or deleted please try visiting our A-Z index and adjust any old bookmarks accordingly.