Frustrated with intermittent speed problems

[hahapatz]

I've always had connection problems with my laptop, but I blamed it on my college's awful WiFi because everyone has problems with it. But I always seem to have more trouble than other people, and now that I'm back home with good WiFi, I'm still having problems.

 

Basically my download speed varies anywhere from 100 kbps to 15 mbps, and my upload speed is about the same only the max is closer to 5 mbps. One minute everything is running smoothly, and then a page that shouldn't take any time to load at all will get stuck halfway through. Either it won't finish, or it'll take anywhere from a few minutes to a half hour to load completely. Same thing happens during the speed tests - it's downloading just fine, and then the progress bar will just freeze halfway through and it'll take who knows how long to get going again. I've updated my drivers, quarantined malware, and dumped my cache to see if that would help, but it's not making any difference. None of the other computers in the house are like this and my dad's laptop gets anywhere from 15 to 20 mbps for downloads when I run the test on there. My computer's performance is otherwise fine. Any ideas what could be wrong? I apologize in advance as I'm fairly computer illiterate, so I might need you to break it down for me. 

[CA3LE]

Hi hahapatz, welcome to TestMy.net.

 

First, can you give us some details on your laptop.  Looks like you're on Windows 7.  What's the specs on the laptop, what's the brand and model number?  What package do you subscribe to with Comcast?

 

Do you have an ethernet cable?  I think that we've already established that it's your laptop and not the network... but there's still a chance that the wifi at your school did suck and you have a new problem at home.  Let's first make sure you're getting your speeds to your modem, then wired from the router.

 

Before you start, get some more scientific baselines.  For your connection, run a 50 MB speed test, manually select this on the download speed test.  In your current state this will take a while but that's what we want.  You want more duration and also less variables between the tests.  So we're going to manually select the sizes so that the only variable between our tests is the equipment.

 

First, connect your cable modem directly to your laptop via ethernet.  Reset the modem by unplugging it briefly (10 seconds to be safe), this will make the modem reset to your laptops MAC address.  Do the same whenever you connect to a different device.

 

After you get online return to TestMy.net and run some tests.  Again, manually select the test size you selected the first time.

 

Compare... then re-include the router into mix.  This time, hook it up via ethernet instead of wifi.  Same thing, return here and test the same way.

 

Those tests will tell us a lot, then we'll continue.