[SOLVED] Welcome to my nightmare

[Xanity]

Hi Guys.

I have had a horrible problem for months, and months now.
I am a big online gaming fanatic, and I used to get horrible lag spikes some time ago whilst playing.. however back then, I was sharing my connection with my brother next door so I would always automatically blame him as I knew he liked to stream videos alot.

The thing is, the past few months he hasnt even been living here and I am still getting these lag spikes randomly, on and off intervals at random times of the times. Never specific times or anything.

I have a gigantic ticket still currently open with my ISP about this, me basically blaming them. They have done everything they possibly can, they have even added there extra services to my connection that you usually need to pay for like Max premium etc.

Today I also had a BT Engineer come out to look at my phone line, he re wired the lot and gave me a new faceplate for the socket and then went to the local exchange to do some other stuff, later that day he called me back to let me know my line is absolutely perfect.

Unfortunately I am still getting these lag spikes.

The best part is after all this whining to BT and my ISP, today I discovered I was able to /ping my router :) I Never knew that.
The ISP taught me to ping bbc.co.uk to see how the ping response times were, they were bad but they never told me to try and ping my own router.

C:\Users\Administrator>ping 192.168.1.254

Pinging 192.168.1.254 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 192.168.1.254: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=255
Reply from 192.168.1.254: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=255
Reply from 192.168.1.254: bytes=32 time=250ms TTL=255
Reply from 192.168.1.254: bytes=32 time=87ms TTL=255

Ping statistics for 192.168.1.254:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 1ms, Maximum = 250ms, Average = 85ms

Tracing route to home [192.168.1.254]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms home [192.168.1.254]

Tracing route to home [192.168.1.254]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 167 ms 1 ms 1 ms home [192.168.1.254]

After this, I automatically believed the problem to be my router.
I have ordered a new router already, but the only thing now is after having a talk on ventrilo with some guys, before I even said I have ordered a new router I just said that my ping times to my router are all over the place, one guy said its my ethernet cable.
I tried several different cables, and same problem. I even decided to try a different network card (I use a onboard one) and it was the same problem with this too. Ofcourse I will need to wait to see if a new router will make any difference but I really am not so sure, I dont want to get my hopes up anymore.

I say this simply because, after googling phrases of my problem I found some exact results of people with the same problem on forums etc and what interested me mostly was that, these guys were saying the problem was only happening on one computer.
Which does infact remind me of the past, whenever I was lagging and stuff, I would ask my brother and he was never having any problems at all.

I am using Windows Vista 64bit, my router is a 2Wire HG1800 and its some onboard Realtek card that I use.

I am honestly giving up expecting my ISP to help me out, and well to be honest I guess I cant really expect them too now as it is indeed looking like some kind of hardware problem.

I BELIEVE my pc to be clean, as I have had active AV's always running and I perform full scans quite regulary. I also defrag often too. My network card has the most up to date driver. I dont have any firewall on my pc, windows firewall is disabled. I dont have loads of programmes running in the background.

I am hoping some expert on here will take an interest in this case, and try to solve my problem for me/with me.

Please let me know of any other information you should require to look into this further, you have no idea how much I will appreciate any help at all given.

Thank you for your time reading, and I look forward hearing any responses.

Lee

[Xanity]

Anyone please?

[techbytes]

Few things that could explain your problems.

1. If your router has wireless and is unsecured, then your neighbors could be leeching off your connection.
2. From the ping results, your router is CPU bound (busy doing something). This could be a bug in firmware. So you should update the firmware.

[Stu_computer]

hi Lee,

i don't use the BT DSL stuff so not much help with it in particular, but there is a website that is very useful for networking info and tools like TCPOptimizer so suggest you give it a try http://www.speedguide.net/ and specifically for dsl check the DSL FAQ page

[johnwill]

Register at DSLReports and run their Line Quality Tests. It's best to run this test with a direct wired connection to eliminate any wireless issues from the results. It's useful many times to run this test several times, and we'd like to see each of the results. Post the results link from the top of the test display page for each test run here.

The link to post is near the top of the page and looks like:

If you wish to post this result to a forum, please copy/paste this URL
http://www.dslreports.com/linequality/nil/2357195 <- sample only, yours will obviously be different!
and your IP will be disguised.

Copy/paste that link here.

Note: You will have to enable PING (ICMP) request response either in your router (if you have one), or in your computer's firewall for direct modem connections. This is very important to get the most important part of the test to run.


DSLReports

Here's also the Line Quality Tests FAQ to help you understand the results. This will answer some questions about the line quality display.

[Xanity]

Hi
The router is wireless but its always been disabled so it wont be that
I am going to do a few of those tests and then I will paste the results :)

[Xanity]

Heres one
http://www.dslreports.com/linequalit...7736aa/2578019
Second
http://www.dslreports.com/linequalit...762c4c/2578021

[Xanity]

Third
http://www.dslreports.com/linequalit...2aa5b5/2578028

I will leave it there for now, let me know if I should do anymore or another type of test

[Xanity]

The third one says fail on it :o

[Xanity]

So what do u guys think?

[johnwill]

I think you have ISP issues.

[techbytes]

Try continuous ping of your router with different packet sizes:
Press "Ctrl C" to stop the ping after about 20 pings.
l = packet size (40, 256, and 1460 bytes)

1. ping 192.168.1.254 -l 40 -t

2. ping 192.168.1.254 -l 256 -t

3. ping 192.168.1.254 -l 1460 -t

Post the results here.

[Xanity]

Today I just got my new router and now pinging to my router is all 1ms, I did what techbytes said too with those different sizes and they were all 1ms

So I guess the problem was my old router after all!

All seems good now anyway, thanks guys :D

[techbytes]

You're welcome and glad you're happy with the new router.

My linksys router is about 6 yrs old and still kicking (knock on wood).

[Xanity]

:d :)