Laptop Hogging Wireless Bandwidth

[Lord _Snooty]

Hi
I have a Belkin wireless router which works find with three or four PCs / Laptops on it. Even when one of the PCs is doing a heavy download the other machines still get access. However, I have one compact Laptop that seems to hog bandwidth even when it is doing nothing. Even when it is just logged on and aquired the network, everything grinds to a halt, with the other PCs unable to get onto the net I even have trouble accessing the router!. I have checked the laptop and can't see any processes running, but the CPU usage is 15+% even in idle mode. The router is flashing away as if there is a huge amount of traffic. Anyone know of any software that I can download to see what this laptop is doing, or has anyopne come across this before? All PCs/Laptops run XP, mixture or IE6 & Firefox. Broadband connection is 4megabits an is normally able. :hmm:

All help gratefully recieved.

[Met44]

The symptoms you are having commonly occur when a network card is beginning to fail; it will 'jabber', creating garbage traffic which consumes processing power on your computer and the router.

http://www.wireshark.org/

You can run that on your laptop to see all traffic originating from and being received by your laptop... however most packet sniffers, like Wireshark, won't tell you much unless you have some background in networking.

The issue you are having sounds likely to be an issue with a failing network card on your laptop, in which case replacing the card is usually the only option. If you or someone you know is computer savvy, try swapping out the network card with one from a different laptop (if possible), and see if you get the expected results. If the wireless interface is integrated, see if you are under warranty.