Internet connection intermittent - but connection fine; what's wrong?

Decadent Fool

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Mods, I've posted this in here as who know's what's up with my machine :mad:

My 20mb connection works in bursts from full speed to nothing, and has coincided with a load of upgrades including moving from ide to sata drives (2 x 500gb). I know my connection is fine as laptop works great, and I spent £5 with virgin only to be told it was fine :mad::(

Current status:

clean xp pro install
via mobo drivers upto date
new nic

I have a funny feeling it's a sata problem...I don't know why, I just have.

PLEASE, all suggestions gratefully received, this is driving me wild :confused::confused::confused::confused::confused::confused::confused::confused:
 
Out of interest have you implemented SATA via a PCI add-in card or was SATA on your motherboard?
 
Ah, it's just that I was experiencing some SATA issues on a PCI card which I had moved to accomodate a LAN card. So I'm not much help for you!
 
Just a thought, is the new NIC a replacement for an older one and is used in the same slot?
 
All support, even just moral, gratefully received :)

The original nic is onboard, I only bought the new one to solve my problems. Or obviously not:):(:rolleyes:
 
Did your NIC come with its own driver cd that you used or did you just let Windoze find its own drivers? Maybe an updated set of drivers from the supplier may help?

Is the NIC card and PCI slot of the same revision? (I had BIG issues with a 2.2 USB card not being backwards compatible with an older 2.1 PCI slot).

Can the NIC be manually uninstalled and sited in a different PCI slot? If so, I'd also do that.
 
A few years ago I was having similar "slowing" issues on my PC only when connected to the net. I used Ping Plotter to chart the connection speed and lost packets at all points in the network to home in on the suspect area. It looked like my PC was interrupting the signal as regular as clockwork every copule of minutes or so. I never found the exact cause but I did disable a few non essential services that were running in the background.
 
Thanks Mr Incredible, but the problem was the same with the onboard, the pci nic has made diddly squat difference. I'm using the supplied drivers btw.

I'm going to stick my old ide drive in, reinstall windows, and see what I get.

Thing is though, if it works great on ide, what do I do then?
 
Reinstall your IDE drive, but just point your windoze swap file to that instead of the SATA and disable the swap file on the SATA and see if that makes a difference.
 
While tinkering, I set the onboard nic to 10baset half duplex, and I get a constant connection, same speed near as dammit as when I had a 4mb pipe. If I set it to 100base or auto, the connection peaks and dies.

Mmm....
 
Your droping packets on the line. Would make sure that all of your sockets have the wee boxes and also that the line has no interference. There is a code to test this but i cant remember it :).
 
The command is tracert and then the IP address.

It does look suspicioulsy like a faulty NIC. But you get the same when you install a seperate PCI Card NIC?
 
Thanks guys but already tried; ping'ed bbc.co.uk, response 13 ms and no packets lost. Been maxing the connection on my laptop all day so it's not the line.

What's weird as well is that the connection is steady when set to 10mb, not up and down.

Both nics do it, which fries my head a little; unless of course there's a problem with the pci bus/setting on the board/bios...(I'm slowly making my way through the bios!)

Thanks again all for the help :)
 
Are you running different software on your PC like Bit Defender, or a different ant-virus or spam program? Switch them off.

Can the laptop be used on the same physical cable as your PC to test the physical connection? (Faulty router port perhaps)
 
Nope, all I have running is Zonealarm, not got around to av yet as was trying to keep things as smooth as possible :)

BUT, the plot thickens! Actually, it clears a bit; I booted from a linux cd and got my full download speed so I'm reasonably confident it's not a hardware issue.

So, reinstall of windows it is....again.... :)

Feeling a lot happier though for at least getting somewhere no matter how slowly.
 
Remember how they used to say how all this technology was going to make our lives simpler....

:censored:
 
Update:

IT WAS FU**ING ZONEALARM ! :mad::censored::thumbsdow

I feel let down, I've used this firewall for years and sworn by it. I've never had any problems before but for some reason it doesn't like the upgrade to 20mb. What fooled me was that my laptop, also with ZA, was maxing the connection.

Dammit, but at least it's sorted now...so I can get back to trying to get hardware acceleration on my 2600 pro. :)

I hate computers sometimes :rolleyes:
 
Many people have many problems using Zonealarm. I uninstalled mine years ago and rely on the adsl router firewall and Windows firewall. ZoneAlarm can suck big time.
 

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