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I am having a slight problem with the internet on my PC.

I have a Dell Precision 670 which is running Windows XP and Ubuntu as a dual-boot configuration and is connected to the router via Ethernet.

The problem initially started a few months back with web pages taking a very long time to load, and sometimes not loading at all. I know it is not an issue with my bandwidth as I have done numerous speed tests and the results have always been around the 2.5/3.5 Mbps mark (once the speed test page eventually loaded up!.

I also have a laptop (Windows 7) which uses the same router (but wirelessly) and that has no issues with browsing the internet at all and is relatively smooth and quick.

I recently formatted my PC's hard disk and did a clean install of XP and Ubuntu as I thought this maybe what it needed as it was generally running slow in every aspect.

I have installed all required drivers, looked at many sites and tried methods advised on there, such as DNS flushing, IP renewing, ping testing and none of them seem to have helped.

(for the ping test I used: Ping www.google.com -t where it continuously pings and it resulted in a lot of requests timed-out {About 1 out of every 5/6 pings}).

Also, I originally thought this could be due to a faulty network card or cable, however I don't seem to have this problem when using the internet on Ubuntu! That is the part that really confuses me as my internet was poor on my old installation of XP, is poor on my new clean installation of XP but is fine on Ubuntu.

Any tips or ideas will be greatly received,

Thanks for any comments,

JD

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When you pinged google. What is the IP address it is using? I think you could be having broken IPv6 issues. – billc.cn Oct 22 '12 at 19:13
@billc.cn I read that it could be a IPv6 somewhere else so I disabled it (or at least I think I did!) I have just done a ping test again now and the IP is: 173.194.67.99 And 3 of the 10 pings resulte in a request timed out! – JD87 Oct 22 '12 at 19:28
This is an IPv4 address, so not an IPv6 problem. It seems you're losing a lot of packets on the connection which will definitely cause you delays during connection establishment. Could you check the quality of your Ethernet cable and maybe the LAN socket as well? Some ethernet controllers have free diagnostic software that you can download to check the quality of the connection. – billc.cn Oct 22 '12 at 19:34
@billc.cn I am just looking at my Ethernet cable now and it does look rather twisted and old. At the minute I don't have a replacement to test it, however, could that be the case then? I always assumed that if a cable was damaged it just wouldn't work at all! – JD87 Oct 22 '12 at 19:42
Ethernet is not completely digital and has error correction built-in, so it is possible for a damaged cable to transmit data. However, I don't think this is the whole story though. Normally damanged cable will limit your speed over long distance, but should not be a big problem if the cable is short. There could be some other problem with the other parts of your network, but let's eliminate the obvious ones first. – billc.cn Oct 22 '12 at 19:46
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2 Answers

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Solution is to check the physical connection (cable and sockets) first.

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Since the same hardware works fine with different software (Ubuntu vs Windows XP), tells me it is the driver. Either try obtaining a newer version of the driver for XP, or try to tweak some parameters (e.g. TCP receive window, MTU). See DrTCP for tuning network stack parameters on XP.

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