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
Edited by Ashonn, 08 March 2006 - 07:01 AM.