OK, so Ive just had cable broadband installed and im have some connection problems. When i go online my connection speed is really slow. CorrectConnect (which i was told i had to install) claims that it cant detect an NIC adaper or Ethernet card but im connecting with a USB cable. Occasionally everything will just work and i get normal download speeds. The rest of the time i basically have a glorified dial up!

As I understand it, Cable Broadband is shared with everybody else on that Cable connection. So, if everybody else in your neighbourhood logs on at the same time as you, it's going to be slower than when you're up at 4am surfing.

Can only suggest you check all your software options and make sure all boxes are ticked accordingly.

Dump USB and get an eithernet card (NIC)

Don't you just love it when someone tells you to do something without explaining the reasons why?

By using USB your PC is using up valuable resources on memory which is better spent elsewhere. You are much better off buying an ethernet card which can be brought cheaply (try www.novatech.co.uk) and could even see a slight speed increase although don't expect miracles.

Another thing you can do is to uninstall the Connect software that is bundled with the installation CD. This doesn't do anything more useful then to tell you if you have a connection and the quickest way to do that is to open up a web page anyway. The less useless software you have loaded in memory the quicker your PC runs.

Other than that try moving to Worthing where chances are you'll be surrounded by old people thus having the whole street's bandwidth to yourself.

..or upgrade to a higher speed

That's because I'm fed up with telling people to use eithernet and the likes of NTL won't allow me to say so on thier web site.

The USB vs PCI nic should not make a difference on your cable connection speed. Also since you say sometimes it works great other times is slow, I doubt it's anything on your PC assume you always have the same stuff running in the background. To confirm - when you thinking it's slow, check the task manager for your CPU utilitization - if it's pegged at 100% by something else (virus scan?) it will make your web pages seem to load much slower.

Otherwise if everything on your PC seems normal and assuming it's the same sites that you see the difference on, call your provider and ask them what's up.