What is the best NIC for the price/Huge lag problems on WSU internet

I Have been having huge lag/ping problems when playing any game online, often times internet pages loads slow, and even short streaming videos take forever to load! The problems seem to go away at around 1 AM, but then it can still be unstable (ping spikes, etc.). When I did 3 "speed tests" from Speakeasy.net my average download at 11:30 at night was only about 1500kbps (yes bits not bytes) and only about 280kbps upload. I was wondering If there were any hardware related issues that could cause this. Also, could maybe a better NIC, like a good 3com one, or maybe using Cat6 instead of cat5 help at all? It's just that other people are not having the same problems as I. It seems only our floor does. Please give me any suggestions or info you can since I am very new to this networking stuff. Thanks.

decripple