Greetings,

Recently, about two months ago to the present, my internet connection has randomly been dying or losing its signal. It's hard to explain but basically I will be browsing the internet (take note, this may only happen once a week) and suddenly everything will become very sluggish. Websites will fail to load, I will refresh and refresh and sometimes they will instantly load on the refresh or they will slowly load. In multiplayer games, it will start lagging very bad with huge lag spikes, and sometimes it will clear up forever, or just for 5 mins. Sometimes in games it will continue spiking every 5 minutes until finally everything just stops responding and I am forced to restart my PC.

I have called my ISP about this and they gave me the standard "try disabling some background programs" or "you have spyware" answer. However, none of this can be true as I run weekly maintenance on my PC and have no viruses, spyware, malware, or etc. unless it is so highly advanced I can't detect it. Also, the only program I have running when I boot up is my ZA Firewall. They tried to claim that my ZA Firewall was causing the problem and to disable it (keep in mind, I've been using this firewall with this ISP for over 5 years) and just for the heck of it, I tried it and nothing changed.

The weird thing about this is, it's never happened before. Even on my previous formats where I was loaded down with spyware and viruses, my connection has never acted like this. I've been with the same ISP for nearly 7 years and have had no problems with the connection randomly dying. Have went through standard procedure when I have a problem and checked to make sure all my phone lines were securely connected, and not falling apart, already, but it continues to do this.

Overall, I've tried pretty much everything I can possibly think of to solve this problem and failed. This is where someone on the forums comes in. Hopefully someone here will be able to help me with this problem. It is greatly appreciated for any help that you can provide and I thank everyone in advance for taking the time to do so.

OS: Windows XP Pro SP2
Modem: U.S. Robotics 56K Fax PCI

This post has been edited by Ashonn: Mar 8 2006, 07:01 AM

is your isp also your phone service provider? if so..push the issue untill they send a tech out to test the lines...if not...get your phone company to come out and test the lines....do you have another phone jack in the house that you could test with?

Thanks for replying dsenette.

To answer your question--no, my phone service provider is not my ISP.

I have a phone jack on the side of the house that I am able to plug a phone directly into and test the line myself. I've done that and it works fine. I've also checked the wires on the phone jack to make sure they are securely connected and everything was good.

Is there some other test I should be doing?

just because you can plug a phone i nto the line and verify a dial tone...doesn't mean that there's not a subtle problem in the line...such as a small crack in the coating...or a water intrusioni...or an intermittant short in one of the lines that only bridges during high wind...any of these things can cause problems...your issue being so random (once a week or so)....tends to h ave me leaning towards the phone line having an issue...

I see your point and it's a good one. It would make sense seeing as how the weather can be bad or good at times and may cause problems if there was something wrong with the line. On that note, I'll work on having the phone company come and test the line.

Just a question though, say I have the phone company come test it in the next week and they find something wrong with the line that they repair. A couple more weeks later I've had it repaired and have been testing but still have problems. Would this topic still be around for me to bump back up with new information or should I plan on making a new topic?

Also, is there any other things you think I could try in the meantime to maybe improve the situation?

Thanks again for the help.

yes this topic would still be available for you to repost in and continue to recieve help if it's not a bad line....you could also just as easily start a new topic...so whichever way suites you best...

one thing to try in the mean time is
start > run, type
eventvwr.msc
<enter>

Look under systems and applications for items with red Xs that happened at the SAME time as your problem...list them here.

I'm not entirely sure if this error was during the exact time as when I had problems, but it's close. It seems to be the same, and only, error that repeats itself every couple hours since January 17th 2006. I've been having problems with this for a couple months now, so that date would line up right around when all this began.

Maybe you can make heads or tails of it...

I haven't been able to get the line tested yet. However, I've been paying more attention to that error I posted in my last post and it seems that everytime this happens that error usually comes up at the same time.

Just as a test I disabled the "IPSEC Services" service and my internet seemed to be more responsive. However, after a little bit it still did the same thing and I had to reconnect to the internet.

Does anyone know why this error happens around the same time I have problems?

Also, the problem has seemed to be happening more often recently. Sometimes three, or even four times a day. I'm hoping to get the line tested within the next week.

This post has been edited by Ashonn: Mar 18 2006, 11:32 PM