Browsing Problem Every Few Minutes, Wired Or Wireless...

[DaveMcLain]

I have an Asus Netbook that I use as a portable machine it's handy for web browsing, e-mail etc. The computer works great but I've been having a problem with connectivity and I'm at a loss as to what the problem might be....

Using any of the three browsers I have installed, Firefox, Chrome or IE8 loading a web page happens quickly and all is well usually. Then when clicking on a link or trying to open a new web page, a page not found type of error will occur. I can click refresh several times and then suddenly the page will load either in some weird partial way without all of the images or just perfectly. The browser will work for a while and then break down again.

So far I've tried using the built in wireless adapter AND a wired connection which produced identical results. This doesn't just happen at one location but any location that I've tested including a local restaurant/bar that offers wifi. I can't seem to nail it down to any one component, hardware or software and otherwise the computer works just fine.

I'm running Windows XP SP3 with all the latest updates. Again it will do this no matter what browser I use or even what DNS server I select. I can use DHCP addressing or manually configured on either network connection. It also doesn't matter if the pages are sourced from the internet or locally. I can get the problem to happen when accessing a router configuration page too.

Any ideas?

 

[DaveMcLain]

I think I found the problem. For some reason in my network connections I found an additional item, Internet Gateway. For some reason this was in there and I couldn't disable it until I opened it and disconnected. Then I was able to disable it. I'm not quite sure how it got enabled and also how it was making my connection unstable. It still worked but not well.



I ended up going into add remove programs, add remove windows components, networking services, details and unticked Internet Gateway Device Discovery and Control Client. All is well and that Internet Gateway icon has not returned to network connections.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

That's odd..I haven't seen that affect computers. Windows plops that in there when it discovers a router that has UPnP enabled. If you boot up and latch onto a network that doesn't have a router with UPnP enabled, it simply won't load.

Curious, do you have a quality updated antivirus on your system, recent scan, also with a malware removal/cleaning program like MalwareBytes?

 

[DaveMcLain]

I thought that cured the problem but it did not, the computer still acts the same as before. Every few minutes I have a page loading problem with the browser of choice and it takes several clicks of refresh to get the page to load and render correctly. This happens with either wireless or wired connections too. I've scanned for viruses and malware and found nothing using an up to date AVG and Malwarebytes utility.

 

[thiggins]

Does a long ping show packet loss or anything unusual?

 

[DaveMcLain]

One thing I've noticed is that this problem has not shown up in the last half hour after rebooting the machine. I'm still using a wired connection but right now all is well. Very strange...

 

[DaveMcLain]

I upgraded the driver for the wireless adapter and that seems to have helped the problem. I don't quite understand why the wireless driver would also seem to have some effect on the wired LAN connection's performance but I think that might be the case.

Where is the best place to look for packet losses? I've looked in the router when I'm connected to a D-Link DIR-655 AP and it shows zero packet loss after a session so I'm assuming all is well.

 

[thiggins]

Look for packet loss between client and router.

 

[DaveMcLain]

I believe I've found and fixed the problem which turned out to be in the power savings setting of the wireless driver. I changed this to maximum and that has cured the problem. I had experimented before by changing it from normal to off and it seemed to make the problem worse. Going the other way made all well but why? Who knows..

 

[thiggins]

Thanks for reporting back, Dave.