Packet loss on parents' computer

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Merithiel

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Jan 28, 2005
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The computer is...old. Around 5 years. Hardware/software-wise, it's pretty clean. Win XP Pro. The only questionable prog installed was AOL, which will be further explained. The NIC is 10 mbps, but that doesn't matter.

One day, around...say...a month ago my mother turned on the computer and she noticed she couldn't go online. We just switched from a DSL connection to a cable connection, but everything was done through a router, so no changes to the internal network. I looked at it and quickly determined that the computer wasn't getting a valid IP address from the router. It was giving itself one of those 146.95.*.* IPs...

Oddly enough, doing an ipconfig /release gave an error like 'no applicable media adapter connected' or the like, whille doing a /renew just crashed the CMD window. Doing these functions from the Network Connections and properties windows had the same results.

Honestly, I had no idea idea what it was, but I've had a hate for AOL for a nice long while. I decided to disable all of the AOL services and after I killed the AOL Connectivity Service, it got an IP and everything was fine. I disabled the Service altogether after that.

Fast forward 3 or so weeks and the computer starts loading pages sluggishly. Yesterday, my dad finally complained since it is used as a work computer technically. Apparently, it's getting around 10-20% packet loss when pinging the router.. Between it and the router there is around 100 feet of Cat5 cable, but it shouldn't make a difference. I made a nice long ping run from my laptop to router via that cable and there was absolutely no loss, so it's not the cable's fault.

Any idea what it could be? From software to hardware to stupidity...

In any case, nothing new was installed on the computer in the last 3 months for sure.

Please suggest some ways to further debug this and solve it. Replacing the NIC is simple(assuming it's not onboard), but I'd rather not unless absolutely necessary.

Thanks!

EDIT: More info. I tried setting it to take an IP from the DHCP and giving it a static one. Same results. NetBIOS is enabled. Router in question is a WRT54G. It's working perfectly. Whatever the NIC is will be updated in 9 or so hours when I get home.

Also, I know this is retarted, but is there anything like an ethernet to USB adapter? Hopefully cheap if existant.
 
Merithiel said:
The computer is...old. Around 5 years. Hardware/software-wise, it's pretty clean. Win XP Pro. The only questionable prog installed was AOL, which will be further explained. The NIC is 10 mbps, but that doesn't matter.

.........................................................

EDIT: More info. I tried setting it to take an IP from the DHCP and giving it a static one. Same results. NetBIOS is enabled. Router in question is a WRT54G. It's working perfectly. Whatever the NIC is will be updated in 9 or so hours when I get home.

Also, I know this is retarted, but is there anything like an ethernet to USB adapter? Hopefully cheap if existant.
Click to expand...

I would start wityh the NIC. The NIC sounds like it's older than the PC.

Yes they do make USB to Ethernet devices. I cary one around with my for just such a case, and they useualy can be found pretty cheap. Maybe something like this.

Or if you need one today.. Compusa has them


Looks like Best buy may have them as well
 
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