Packets at a snail's pace

November 16, 2006 5:35 PM

Very strange internet connectivity issue driving me batty....

I am suddenly having sporadic problems with my net connection. The amount of data flowing in just slows to a crawl. Effects are visible in both Firefox and IE, as well as other applications downloading from the net (a Spybot update, for example). A simple page can take minutes to open.

The really mysterious part is that this seems to be happening regardless of where I am. Home or office, VPN or no, Ethernet or WiFi, it just keeps happening. And it's not 100% consistent-sometimes things will open okay for a while.

I've tried super obvious things like rebooting, clearing caches, using the "repair network connection" in Windows, but to no avail. I've got lots of extensions in Firefox, but this is not an FFX-only problem. I didn't do any installs or configuration changes to XP that I can think of-it just seems to have started at random.

Any ideas? This is beyond annoying.

posted by Chrysostom to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

I would d/l a VMWare player and an browser appliance.. if that works well under XP... if that works fine.. you can rule out low level configurations issues.. if that doesn't work well.. the root of the problem will most likely be very systemic.
posted by cowmix at 5:48 PM on November 16, 2006

Next time it happens try pinging whatever server you're trying to access. If there's a lot of latency, do a traceroute (tracert in xp?)... maybe something interesting will turn up? Especially if this is happening over multiple internet connections.
posted by nathancaswell at 5:53 PM on November 16, 2006

netstat is your friend
posted by IronLizard at 6:08 PM on November 16, 2006 [1 favorite]

same or different isps? ... your office may have the same one as your home ...
posted by pyramid termite at 7:06 PM on November 16, 2006

Same or different computers? If this is your laptop, it's probably spyware-infested.
posted by flabdablet at 8:52 PM on November 16, 2006

Response by poster: I considered spyware, but I'm running AdAware, Spybot, Spyware Blaster, and Windows Defender, plus XP's firewall. Everything shows clean.

I'll check out netstat IronLizard, thanks.
posted by Chrysostom at 5:14 AM on November 17, 2006