I saw a social media post asking for help getting the Ethereum blockchain to synchronise. I recently had the same problem and tried many of the same things to resolve the issues. That is, I opened the ports 30303 and 30304 on my router, enabled uPnP. I even brought a new SSD because the drive I was syncing to was running at 100%. Still, the blockchain would kept lagging behind.

![Ethereum Splash Screen](http://ifps.io/ipfs/QmYJHafCo4wLMgSHR6J9tYDHdmy6PmPU5RABY2Pv4VEFpG)

I got Ethereum to fully sync with some spicy command line action that puts the geth program into a light mode. The instructions below are for Windows.

1. Open the command prompt
2. In the command prompt, change the current directory to the one that holds your local copy of geth.exe<br><code>cd C:\Users\XXXX\AppData\Roaming\Mist\binaries\Geth\unpacked</code><br>where XXXX is your username
3. Run this:<br><code>geth --syncmode "light" --verbosity 4</code>

Wait a few seconds before starting your wallet software as usual. You'll get a screen of debug spam. You can drop the verbosity level to 3, though at three you cannot see if geth is making connections to peers, so I leave verbosity on four.

Once you have an up to date blockchain (and you've done whatever business you needed to do), then I like to go back and run:<br><code>geth --syncmode "full"</code>
This will _eventually_ get a local copy of the full blockchain. But, for some reason, that mode seems to always be behind for me. Whenever I want to do anything that needs a synced up wallet, I go back to <code>--syncmode "light"</code>. I've had no ill effects switching back and forth between light and full syncmodes.

One other thing: If your wallet GUI says there is a new version of geth to download, then you'll need to stop the geth running in your command prompt (Ctrl-c) before you download the update. Once the the download is complete, then exit the wallet software and re-run Geth in your command prompt.

You'll see Ethereum now synchronises very quickly indeed. 

Steem on.