Any idea what is the problem with my connection? (in Off-topic)

As you can gather from the title, I've been having connection troubles. For the last couple of days, my internet has been horribly slow. I get cable, from a local company. Anyway, the problem is is that the speed keeps dropping. For example, I'll start to DL something and it will start fine at the usual 40Kbs, then after around 6 seconds it drops to almost nothing. Or I can fight 4 battles in a row at regular speed, then the next battle takes 12 seconds to load. It seems to just waiver from regular to nearly nothing constantly. My wireless signal is good since my laptop is right by my wireless router pretty much.

My question to any of the informed, helpful people people in CB, is what is my problem? I've checked for viruses and spyware, and come up negative on both. I'm about decided it's just my local cable company's fault, and will probably call them tomorrow. I'm just curious, anyone else have another opinion / idea?

is there any unusual or unexpected activity on your modem or router? I had a similiar problem recently, but I could see my router working overtime, traced to some trojan horses on my wife's computer were working overtime trying to get to my computer and out of the router, basically clogging up my network with constant requests. They were not picked up by HiJack This or Spybot Search and Destroy or Adaware. I ended up getting a trial version of TDS-3 and on a full scan it found everything. Not sure if that is your problem or not. I did a netstat -an and noticed some suspicious connections in listen state to realize it was a trojan/back door type of program. Might check yours.

Hmm, you might be right there. My modem's activity light is nonstop flashing all the time, and my wireless router's lights labelled WAN and WLAN are both flashing nonstop as well. I can't say I remember how active they were before, but I don't believe it was this much.

Maybe I will try that TDS-3. Couldn't hurt I suppose. I'll just have to DL it somewhere else, since I can't get past the first couple hundred kilobytes before my DL's stop.

What are the ways to check what all my router / modem are doing? I've checked the log on the router by typing in the IP address of it or whatever, but couldn't find any relevant info. What all do I need to do here?

Thanks for any more help.

Yay! I am no longer in need of help! Thank you to Sefton though for your advice.

If anyone is interested, it just came back. I'm thinking perhaps when I went to my router just now and rebooted it and also turned off WAN pings, that those did it. Or maybe my connection finally got better. Either way, I'm happy!

trying to blame the cable company..HAH...how dare you >:)

/me is cable guy :)

If you're anything like Jim Carrey, I'd dare not blame you :P