Intermittent loss of internet

[Pivco]

I have a friend's desktop XP computer at my house along with his mouse,
keyboard, speakers, printer, and power cord.

At my house, his computer works perfectly connected to my cable internet.

At his house, he frequently loses the connection to his DSL internet. He
can get the internet back immediately if he just unplugs the power cord of
his combination modem/router and plugs it back in.

He also has an XP laptop at his house which works perfectly when connected
wirelessly to this modem/router. We purposed disabled the wireless in his
laptop and it works perfectly when hooked up to the modem/router in the same
port using the same ethernet cable that the desktop computer was hooked up to.

A couple of other symptoms:
(1) When his computer is hooked up to my monitor, I get shadows on the
screen from websites that I've been to.

(2) He has an identical modem/router to the one that he is currently using.
He gets the exact same symptoms when he tried using that one instead.

(3) We took the computer (just the tower) to another friend's house. (This
friend uses cable internet.) It also worked perfectly at the the other
friend's house.

What could be causing the problem and how can we fix it?

 

[Jack \(MVP-Networking\).]

Hi
Try to optimize the TP/IP Stack.
Optimizing the TCP/IP Stack - http://www.ezlan.net/Internet_Speed.html
Jack (MVP-Networking).

 

[Pivco]

Jack,

Thank you for your reply. I have never heard of optimizing the TCP/IP
Stack.

Can you explain why optimizing the TCP/IP Stack would make things work at
my friend's house even though the computer works perfectly at my house
without having done this?

Because I'm not familiar with this, can you make any suggestions about
how to appropriately optimize the TCP/IP Stack, besides the information given
at the link that you provided?

Pivco