I know you said you have all wired connections, is there any wireless unit setup? if so do you have it set to secure or could a neighbors kid be sucking your bandwidth downloading music and movies wirelessly on your connection ?

 

That's a good point...

 

I thought of that and have been watching, but have seen no evidence to that. In any case, to use my wireless, one needs a password. I verified this with my laptop.

 

well thats eliminated....... how bout an addon for firefox for speed? experimental release of fasterfox : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12878

 

Just tried this and it looks like it will only work for the US and Canada.

 

How will this work if I have the same problem using other computers?

 

if it works on one, use it on all of em ? but it does not sound at all like a computer problem, but your service provider just can't handle the demands, and you are suffering. complain, complain, and get your neighbors to complain, and maybe they will work to fix the problem.

 

Yup, and you use it to test your connectivity to a major metro area. This way you can find out about your settings and can use DrTCP to tweak them.

Basically what DrTCP does is allows you to increase or decrease your TCP packet size as the default for Windows is very large because Microsoft engineered Windows to be on a corporate network, not the internet.

Try to think of your packet sizes as envelope, small box, and big box. If you have to sit and wait to pack a big box to send it, you'll be there a long time. On the flip side, if you're sending much smaller packets (envelopes) you're having to send one after the other very quickly. This is where DrTCP will allow you to adjust to the small box size and allow you to send decent sized packets but without the overhead of many smaller packets, or waiting for the big ones to fill before being sent.


Kris