Networking slowness

[Rossputin]

Hello all,

A nice bottle of wine for the person who helps me fix this problem!

I have recently built a new computer around an Abit IP35 Pro motherboard.
Also has 4 GB memory, 2 video cards, 2 hard drives, 2 CD/DVD drives, and some USB stuff.

Was working fine until about a week ago, and unfortunately I have no idea what I did (or what Windows might have done automatically) a week ago.

The symptom is a slow network connection including not only slow web page loading (whether connected through my router or directly to the modem), but also serious slowness when just trying to access the router's admin page.

The router is a Linksys WRT54GL wireless router, with my office computer connecting through a CAT-5 cable and two other computers in the house connecting wirelessly. Both of the wireless connections load web pages and the router admin page much faster than the office computer.

Again, cutting out the router and plugging the modem directly into the PC does not improve my web page loading speeds.

I have tried removing memory, using only one video card, unplugging USB stuff and CD/DVD drives, to no avail.

I also disabled the internal LAN jacks and installed a separate PCI networking card, also with no improvement in connection.

Virus scan found nothing.

I reset Winsock stuff, and I reinstalled drivers for network controller, going back from the latest one to the one that came on the CD in the box with the motherboard, and also uninstalled them in the Device Manager and let Windows reinstall them.

Once connected to my internet provider's speedtest server, the speeds are usually fine, around 2Mbps down and half of that up. Speakeasy.net/speedtest is about the same.

I have my Windows pagefile on a different hard drive than the Windows installation. I don't know if that's relevant.

In Task Manager, only a small % of CPU, PageFile, or Network bandwith are being used.


In case it would be helpful, here's the list of processes running on the computer. Sorry it's a little ugly....

Process PID CPU Description Company Name
System Idle Process 0 96.92
Interrupts n/a Hardware Interrupts
DPCs n/a Deferred Procedure Calls
System 4
smss.exe 536 Windows NT Session Manager Microsoft Corporation
csrss.exe 584 Client Server Runtime Process Microsoft Corporation
winlogon.exe 628 Windows NT Logon Application Microsoft Corporation
services.exe 672 0.77 Services and Controller app Microsoft Corporation
ati2evxx.exe 852 ATI External Event Utility EXE Module ATI Technologies Inc.
svchost.exe 868 Generic Host Process for Win32 Services Microsoft Corporation
svchost.exe 924 Generic Host Process for Win32 Services Microsoft Corporation
svchost.exe 1032 Generic Host Process for Win32 Services Microsoft Corporation
wscntfy.exe 3888 Windows Security Center Notification App Microsoft Corporation
svchost.exe 1088 Generic Host Process for Win32 Services Microsoft Corporation
svchost.exe 1268 Generic Host Process for Win32 Services Microsoft Corporation
spoolsv.exe 1516 Spooler SubSystem App Microsoft Corporation
AOLacsd.exe 1056 AOL Connectivity Service AOL LLC
cisvc.exe 1228 1.54 Content Index service Microsoft Corporation
cidaemon.exe 3084 Indexing Service filter daemon Microsoft Corporation
cidaemon.exe 1916 Indexing Service filter daemon Microsoft Corporation
upssrv.exe 1316 UPS Service Cyber Power Systems, Inc.
upsio.exe 1404 upsio Cyber Power Systems, Inc.
mdm.exe 1380 Machine Debug Manager Microsoft Corporation
NBService.exe 1428 Nero BackItUp Nero AG
nod32krn.exe 1820 NOD32 Kernel Service Eset
svchost.exe 2072 Generic Host Process for Win32 Services Microsoft Corporation
FNPLicensingService.exe 2444 Activation Licensing Service Macrovision Europe Ltd.
alg.exe 2800 Application Layer Gateway Service Microsoft Corporation
svchost.exe 3444 Generic Host Process for Win32 Services Microsoft Corporation
lsass.exe 684 LSA Shell (Export Version) Microsoft Corporation
ati2evxx.exe 1216 ATI External Event Utility EXE Module ATI Technologies Inc.
taskmgr.exe 164 Windows TaskManager Microsoft Corporation
explorer.exe 1560 Windows Explorer Microsoft Corporation
aolsoftware.exe 1864 AOL AOL LLC
jusched.exe 1880 Java(TM) Platform SE binary Sun Microsystems, Inc.
rfagent.exe 1908 Registry First Aid Agent, the easy powerful registry cleanup program KsL Software
acrotray.exe 1948 AcroTray Adobe Systems Inc.
RTHDCPL.exe 1964 Realtek HD Audio Control Panel Realtek Semiconductor Corp.
ALCFDRTM.EXE 3292 ALCFDRTM Realtek Semiconductor Corp.
nod32kui.exe 2004 NOD32 Control Center GUI Eset
ctfmon.exe 2032 CTF Loader Microsoft Corporation
TBTray.exe 176 Thunderbird-Tray Felix 'SniperBeamer' Geyer
thunderbird.exe 360 Mozilla Thunderbird Mozilla Corporation
firefox.exe 1160 Firefox Mozilla Corporation
iexplore.exe 4020 Internet Explorer Microsoft Corporation
procexp.exe 484 0.77 Sysinternals Process Explorer Sysinternals

[Snurfen]

Wow, nice to see someone having a pretty thorough go at fault finding before posting! Well done Rossputin (Welcome to CTH, BTW )

By bypassing the router, did you actually plug a different cat5 into the NIC? If not, I'd suggest doing that - possibly by taking the cat5 currently going from the modem to the router, just go straight to the pc using that one, as opposed to using the one that normally goes from the router to your NIC.

[Rossputin]

Thanks for the reply, Snurfen.

Yes, I tried different cables too!

Interestingly (to me), this morning I started Internet Explorer before Firefox. IE is slow, including connecting to my router, but Firefox seems to be at least close to, if not fully at, normal speed, including connecting to my router.

This is soooooo strange.

I may try a system restore to prior to the trouble started.

Thanks again for any and all help!

[freakinprince]

i am just wondering have you even tried calling your ISP to find out if they can see any error generated on your modem? give them a call if you can and see if they can find any error and help you thru it.

was anything install prior to before this happened? window's update? have you updated a firmware in the router lately? see if that makes a difference

[z1p]

Don't mean to step in over you folks helping out, but I just had to add my 2 cent, I hope it helps.

Since the other PCs on the network aren't seeing problems, it doesn't seem liely that it is an issue with the modem or even firmware.

You also said that the speed tests seem fine from that machine, so that seems to indicate that it is not a general connectivity issue.

Seeing that you say the issue is the speed when loading pages, what comes to my mind is a DNS issue.

You could run ipconfig on your machine and see if its DNS servers are different from the machines that are running fine.

I'd also ping the router and DNS servers from a couple of machines and see how the times look.