Why is my internet so unreliable?

[Darren]

I have been suffering from terrible internet for about 4 years now and I'm just about ready to smash every single router, modem, and wireless adapter in the house and order cable.

For Christmas my dad got us a new router and for most of January everything went flawlessly. My signal in my room went from 3 to 4 bars out of 5 and it seemed overall much more reliable and speedy.

Now in February its become slow and will frequently just flat not load anything. Youtube can't load at 240p and I get frequent lag in TF2. This issue is not associated with my computer because my iPod is slow as well.

Any idea what can be causing all of this? I just seem to have terrible luck with all internet.

I don't necessarily want my internet faster (would be nice) , but I want it to stay consistent. When it's working correctly my download speed hovers around 300kb/s and I can stream HD video on my computer from Netflix without much trouble.

Any help would be great but please dont' tell me to "restart my router". That never fixes anything for more than about 3 hours.

 

[johnb35]

The first thing you can do is reboot your modem and router to see if the speed increases back to normal.

 

[cabinfever1977]

who are you using as your internet service provider? and maybe there not providing stable reliable speeds? or could be something with your wireless connection and is it password protected or are your neighbors picking up your wireless and using it for free causing it to slow down for you? And how many people in your house is using the internet at the same time....like is it fast when nobodies home but you and when people come home and go online then it gets slow...

 

[Dngrsone]

You could running a CAT-5e cable between your computer and the router, see if that improves things...

 

[Darren]

I'll try resetting the modem and router. My router has a reset button. Should I use that or just unplug it.

I have At&t DSL.

It does slow down when my dad is streaming Netflix but it still slow when no one is using it.

 

[johnb35]

No you dont want to press the reset button. that will reset the modem back to before it was set up. just unplug it and wait a minute and plug it back in.

 

[Darren]

For the router I mean. The modem has a power button.

 

[johnb35]

No, you don't want to press the button on the back of the router either, that resets it back to default settings. You may have to do that in the end as well. However, see if there is a firmware update for the router.

 

[cabinfever1977]

maybe you just have a cheap dsl connection/provider.
when i had dsl, they said my speed would be betwween 1mb-3mb service and it sure would go up and down between those speeds and was slow half the time.

i went back to charter high speed cable internet,its alot faster

 

[Dngrsone]

DSL throughput is dependent in part upon the number of users on the line, so if you have lots of people in the neighborhood using DSL, then your throughput will be lower.

Not much you can do about that except pay for the next-higher level of service.

 

[Darren]

Well we pay for the highest speed we can in our area except for cable. And my dad won't switch.

Ok so I reset the router and modem. Computer that's wired downstairs and everything in the house is connected and back up to full speed.. Except my computer...

It gets stuck identifying, refuses to connect, limited or no connectivity, or connects and just flat doesn't load anything despite saying its connected. I have tried moving my USB adapter to different sockets. Now my network has a number after it.

Getting quite frustrated. Is there a way to like reset all my network settings on my computer so I can just start afresh and act like the computer has never connected before?

 

[Dngrsone]

Try assigning a fixed IP address, outside the range of your router's DHCP.

In other words, if the router assigns addresses from 192.168.0.100- 192.168.0.200, then try assigning an address of 192.168.0.254

Also, if your router's firewall is on, then you will want to deactivate Windows Firewall.

Third, try setting the DNS server to the IP address of your router (likely either 192.168.0.0 or 192.168.0.1).

 

[Darren]

Ok I have isolated a few issues.

I got rid of Hamachi on my computer that I used for hosting Terraria servers. If I could reinstall it after this all blows over that would be good but it may be the root of my problems.

Everything in the house is working fine now. My computer however is still booting up, then gets stuck identifying the network. After some waiting it finally connected.

Skype popped up informing me that someone was online. I got on the internet and it took about 4 minutes for facebook to load. Went to youtube and that was loaded in a few seconds. Searched a video, loaded at normal speed, then tried to watch it and it just loaded the page with a black box and no thumbnails on the right of other videos. Let it sit but never loaded. Clicked on facebook and after 3 minutes it loaded the blue bar across the top but never got past that.

My dad thinks I have a virus but I honestly have no idea how that would have happened. Doing a full system scan with Avast at the moment.

Any ideas? It seems the problem is stemming my computer alone but the long identifying still makes me think that it may be a network issue.

I tried setting my computer to a static IP address but it yielded no results. In the list of clients on the network all 6 devices that were connected had different IP's.

I am so lost.

Edit: Is it safe to play a Steam game in offline mode while I'm scanning?

 

[Darren]

Fixed. And to be honest I have no idea why. Changed the encryption type from AEP to TKIP. That doesn't really make sense since TKIP was what it was when it started having problems. I switched it earlier to see if it fixed it and it didn't. Switched it back now and it works.

Edit:

Ok after restart it gave me the exact same problem. Not sure what else to do I did a system restore back to before I installed some "critical updates" from Microsoft. The ones that install when you shut down your computer. Rebooted and it connected immediately without a hitch. I'm scared to turn off my computer. Is it possible that the update messed up my computer?