*Very* odd timeouts-making me nu...nu...nu.....nuts

[Greg]

OK, I have G2'd everything I can think of and am at my wit's end.

I have DSL (1.5 meg). Throughput is good, usually about 1.3

I built a new system 3 weeks ago & put XP home on it. I kept my Win98
system and put it on my wireless router. Until this I had no experience
with XP. So, XP pc is hard wired to the router & win98 is wireless
[belkin].

My DSL had been nearly flawless since I switched providers 6 months ago,
until a couple of weeks ago after a storm. I always unplug everything
for storms because central florida is lightning capital of the world.

Anyway, around the time I put the XP pc into service & the storm [I
can't swear to the exact date] I have been having strange connectivity
problems. Of two types.

The first is the obvious. Modem light flickers, loss of signal. Had the
phone people out today &they replaced my box & put a splitter there &
fixed something at the pole. So that would seem to be addressed.

Here is the strange part. I am getting what seem to be timeouts with my
XP pc when I pull down large files. I have tried DLing via FTP, HTTP and
usenet. Same thing happens with each. File is coming across quite well &
data flow just stops. Halfway through a 50 meg file. Sometimes if I just
wait it may start up again 1-5 minutes later. When I am in a NG using
Agent (1.92), it will, after several minutes, sever the connection with
the server. Now, what befuddles me is, when this "pause" in the DL
occurs, I can open [another] OE6 window and go to web sites without a
problem. I have my modem connection, the DL just stops.

At a road runner test site, I can FTP or HTTP a 50 meg file; either way
it happens. On the usenet [easy news] it happens. Same thing if I am
DLing from the web access for easynews groups. AND I tried to UL a 10
meg file (using powerpost) to my web site (lunarpages is the host) last
night & the same thing happened there.

I am at the end of my wits. Is there some way that XP could be
responsible for these "timeouts"? I have been unable to find any kind
of network setting that would seem to deal with this.

BTW, all the patches for XP &OE are current.

Your input is welcome.

Greg

 

[Greg]

Could be your RWIN (buffer) is too small. Try downloading and running SpeedXP. This will optimize your RWIN. If you would rather do it yourself in XP then e:mail me and I will give you the registry routes to the settings to set. This is just a guess on my part. I would also look at the event viewer in your administrative tools for any red X's that correspond to the time of your lockup or loss of service and see if double clicking them brings up a details window on the cause. There are three files in the event viewer. Look at both system and application logs. Good luck. {:~)

A very good suggestion. But I checked the rwin and it was actually too
large (64k). Which can slow things down, but, no change after I set it
to 32K.

It was suggested to me that Norton AV might be at fault. I had the
timeout protection enabled, but it could still be the culpret. I will
try disabling Norton and see what happens.