Some people say that you can use gameranger to play with other people, but I'm not entirely convinced since not even Rome: Total War players are using gameranger after gamespy servers were brought down.

So is gameranger good? Are there alternatives? Does the "game runs too fast" problem persists on online multiplayer and is there a way to fix it?

Looks good. But in your experience, have you suffered from desynch/latency problems in an usual manner? That's the complaints I hear about gameranger.
I read about the solution earlier. It pretty much says that all players should limit their CPUs so the game runs slower. Isn't this a problem when facing random people on multiplayer matches?

Nope. If I understand it correctly, the game is trying to sync to the slowest CPU, so you can always try to limit your CPU to be the slowest one, i.e. by using this soft - http://mion.faireal.net/BES/

Thank you very much :)