What causes poor connection speeds, PC or ISP?

[Dog Of War]

My friend already knows his PC needs to be upgraded or replaced, only we are not sure if his PC is the only problem due to his poor connection speeds. Review info below and give me your thoughts..........

OS: Windows 7.....32-bit system
Processor: 2.6 GHz Dual Core CPU
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Graphics: 512 MB (ATI Radeon HD 5450)
Hard Drive: 300GB
_________________________________________________

Connection Data - ISP is Century Link

PING......96ms
DL Speed....... 5.38 Mbps
UL Speed....... .43 Mbps
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[Dog Of War]

Connection Data - ISP is Century Link

PING......96ms
DL Speed....... 5.38 Mbps
UL Speed....... 0.43 Mbps

[Satoru]

It's really a lot of things to be honest and it highly depends on the situation

Every single link can cause problems. Wifi is always a 'random' factor as it can appear fine one moment, but if you nuke a pizza upstairs, it will obliterate the connection. Local issues like your router NAT table being overloaded by torrents, or the wifi channels being saturated or having a weak signal can really make troubleshooting things odd.

Then you have issues relating to your ISP which may increasing latency or doign QOS on specific packets such that tehy get LOW priority. Which means that totally awesome ping and bandwidth can still translate to TERRIBLE performance as your 'concrete knee high wall war simulator of the month' traffic gets releated below 'pond scum' and 'spam' for priority on the network.

Then you have issues with what you connect TO. Is it another user who is hosting MW3 on their 300 baud 3COM modem? Is the game's lag compensation doing weird things for high ping users? etc.

As you can see the 'numbers' don't really tell the whole story and may not even be relevant.

[DoubleD]

I would say many things can cause HSIA issues.

From you ISP to your Netwrok Card, Modem or Router. Even Browser's and Software. As Satoru mentioned it can take trouble shooting to determine the cause.

[Dog Of War]

So what is best direction to go first?

[Satoru]

The thing is 'what' are they trying to solve. Is it actually connection speed problems or is it that they want more 'fps'.

[Dog Of War]

He never uses a wirless connection

[Dog Of War]

He never uses a wireless connection

[Dog Of War]

He constantly drops in Napolean Toal War

[Dog Of War]

He constantly drops in Napolean Total War

[_I_]

http://store.steampowered.com/app/34030/

Minimum:
OS:Microsoft® Windows Vista®/XP®/Windows® 7
Processor: 2.3 GHz CPU with SSE2
Memory: 1 GB RAM (XP), 2 GB RAM (Vista®/Windows® 7)
Graphics: 256 MB DirectX® 9.0c shader model 2b compatible GPU
DirectX®: DirectX® 9.0c
Hard Drive: 21 GB free space

the pc setup should be fine


have him pingbomb google for a minute and see what the results are

start -> cmd
ping google.com -t

wait about 1 minute then hit ctrl+c
will get results similar to this

C:\>ping google.com -t

Pinging google.com [74.125.225.64] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 74.125.225.64: bytes=32 time=20ms TTL=55
Reply from 74.125.225.64: bytes=32 time=20ms TTL=55
Reply from 74.125.225.64: bytes=32 time=23ms TTL=55
Reply from 74.125.225.64: bytes=32 time=24ms TTL=55
Reply from 74.125.225.64: bytes=32 time=18ms TTL=55

Ping statistics for 74.125.225.64:
Packets: Sent = 5, Received = 5, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 18ms, Maximum = 24ms, Average = 21ms
Control-C
^C

if the loss is over 5% there is a problem with the connection