How can you tell if it's you or the internet

[stocon]

Sometimes I go online and everything drags so I think it's me. I come back 2 hours later it's purring along. While earlier I'm running adware, spybot, speed tests, virus scans, yada, yada that had no effect. Is there a way to tell if it generally slow out there or if it's you?
tia Steve

 

[riser]

www.toast.net to test your internet connection. Run the performance test.

You can also use Tracert in a Command Prompt tracert www.tomshardware.net

it'll show you were things slow down. I'd go with the internet performance test first though.

 

[stocon]

Riser,
I ran the speed test and it's running fast but it takes forever just to dl a page or even jump around in Tom's site. My kids are on a wirelss router and both are dling pages much quicker than me. Yes , i run the broadband test and it says all is well but I hit a link and it takes forever.
I've run adware,spybot and nortons still loads slow. Parts of the pages are coming in like heavy traffic when there really isn't as detected by my kids wireless. I'm connected by wire to a Belkin router. It just started chugging a couple of days, i tested the vid card and it's not it.
Ideas??? Tia Steve

 

[folken]

Did you install anything recently? software, updates, etc.
Does a tracert show a latency spike anywhere?

 

[stocon]

Folken,
I did a liveupdate with Norton's system works and dl some movies and music from newsgroups. I'm not sure what a latency spike is or a tracert. I've watch the graph on task manager and it shows very little use of network when dling, I think I did the live update after the slowdown because I thought it was a germ. It feels like something blocking it, I turn off windows firewall no change.
tia steve

 

[folken]

If you open up a command prompt and type in tracert www.tomshardware.com it will show every router you hop across to get to the tomshardware site and what the latency in ms of each one is (how long the signal takes to get from you to the router and back).

When I do a tracert www.tomshardware.com I go 16 hops. The latency stays at about 16ms until it hits ae-0-0.bbr1.Washington1.Level13.net, then it goes up to 89 and stays around 90-100 till it hits the web server itself. Thats a pretty big jump but it doesn't seem to slow down my browsing speed much.
If you get a big spike in there (run it several times just in case it doesn't do it every time) that might be the cause of your browsing lag.

Just out of curiosity, do the other computers in your house have norton system works on them as well? and are they all updated to the same point as yours? Something inside me is wispering that its nortons fault but since it started before your last update it isn't likely. I've just had very bad experiences in the past with home versions of symantecs software.

 

[stocon]

No Only mine has the whole system works. The others have the norton's corp that seems quite uninvasive and light. I unloaded NSW and viola all is fine now I must reload and hope for the best, I guess it fiddle with it's firewall or sumtin but that was the problem. Thx for the help Steve

 

[blue68f100]

I remove NSW from all of my computers for that same reason. It's bad when 1 prg can bring a 3.2ghz P4 computer to it's knees where a 350mhz PII computer can out perform it. I have had several bad experiences with Norton. I had one subscription expire, it totally corruped the computer, Before I removed. I had them release a bad signature, that caused me to work all weekend trying to find a non-existant virus. They are not on my recomend list at all. The only good product is Ghost 9 or 10 , which they acquired.