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I have a problem with my home network that I have managed to narrow down a bit, but I'm not sure what to check next.

The network behaves just fine, until my wife also connect via WiFi (I'm also connected via WiFi by the way).

When she connects everything start getting slow. When I play games, I get a mad lag. When pinging my server, the ping time goes from ~20ms to ~350ms.

When my wife turns her computer off, the net works fast for me again.

She off course complains that the net is always slow.

So that means that the problem is on her machine I guess.

So what I want to know is if it's any way to see which programs use what portion of bandwidth? It would probably be necessary to know if any "hidden programs" like malware or viruses use the bandwidth as well since I guess that is a likely scenario in this case.

Any help in this case would be appreciated.

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Try using TCPView on her laptop and see what is pulling/sending the most information. – tombull89 Nov 10 '11 at 10:38
tombull89 - It looks like it can be very helpful. Will this show all data sent and received, even if some malware or virus is using the bandwidth? I'm asking because there is no way the programs she is running willingly can take all that bandwidth – Øyvind Knobloch-Bråthen Nov 10 '11 at 10:44
SuperUser is a better place for this question. The FAQ says that SF is not for "general personal computer troubleshooting" or "networking outside the professional workplace". – Nic Nov 10 '11 at 10:46
@ØyvindKnobloch-Bråthen, it should do. I've used it in the past to find out which process was downloading masses of info...turns out it was Windows Update. As Nic said, this is better suited for SuperUser so hold on and this will be migrated in time. – tombull89 Nov 10 '11 at 10:55
Sorry for not putting this on SuperUser. Does this mean that I should delete this and repost it, or it it possible to move it there? Or do I need a moderator to do it for me? – Øyvind Knobloch-Bråthen Nov 10 '11 at 11:20
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migrated from serverfault.com Nov 10 '11 at 14:10

3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

try to check the bandwidth usage on her machine. the bandwidth usage can checked through task manager in windows. probably there is a spyware/virus on her machine that using huge bandwidth and which is choking the whole network. and to go little more deep, try to run WireShark on her machine. Stop any activity and then turn on wireshark to see if there is any high level of packets being sent or received. Try to run "processxp" which is a utility to know that if there are any dangerous applications running on that system just first confirm high bandwidth usage, after that, other issues can be resolved easily.

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Frank - I will try these when I get home from work this evening, and let you know how it turned out :) – Øyvind Knobloch-Bråthen Nov 10 '11 at 11:19
1  
This took shorter time to sort out than I was afraid it would. The problem was she had a torrent client in the back that she did not remember installing, and even if she wasn't downloading anything, some previous download from 3 months back was uploading. Not easy to see though, since it didn't show an icon in the notification area even. TCPView however revealed it. We have a 10Mbit/1Mbit ADSL line at home, and it used the entire 1Mbit upload and basically strangled the ADSL line. Next time, instead of asking her I will double check it myself ;) – Øyvind Knobloch-Bråthen Nov 11 '11 at 7:37
up vote 1 down vote

One thing may be to check the 802.11 b/g. If your wife's laptop is operating 802.11b then the entire network will slow down to a max of 11Mbit/sec.

You could try setting your wireless router/access point to 802.11g only, then you may find that she can't connect.

Just thinking out loud.

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I tried connecting my machine to the router with a cable instead of wireless, but I still got the same result. So that probably rules out this issue. Good thought anyway ;) – Øyvind Knobloch-Bråthen Nov 10 '11 at 20:17
up vote 0 down vote

Sounds like her computer may be infected with malware. I use Malwarebytes Anti-Malware to clean it up.

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