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[LEGOManiac <question59510@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Question #59510 on Ubuntu changed:
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/59510

LEGOManiac proposed the following answer:
I have a dv9310 - not quite the same animal, but I don't have any
problems. I'm answering this because the description of the problem is
familiar.

Two things to clarify first: is it just browsing that is slow or does
the whole reaction time of your PC seem slow? Is it just slowing down or
is it a total failure to connect?

I'm going to bet that if you try to ping an outside site (ping
205.206.171.1) it will appear to work OK, even though you otherwise seem
to have a problem.

Try the following tests:

Before you have problem, go to http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest and
leave the page loaded. Use another browser tab for browsing. Whey your
internet appears to be having problems, run a speed test.

If you have another computer, or can borrow one, put it online at the
time that you are experiencing problems and see if it too is slow.

Here at home, I've been having problems with my internet dropping for
years. The ISP swears it isn't their problem, yet there appears to be
three different causes within my network. The first is the ISP's modem.
The ISP says  they can connect to it but I often find I have to reboot
it when I'm experiencing problems. I ended up replacing it with one
another one as an experiment since I got tired of the ISP claiming their
modem was not to blame and yet the network comes back to life after a
modem reboot. That particular problem has pretty much ended with the
replacement modem, which, btw, is the same model as the one my ISP
supplied. They still swear their modem is not to blame.

Once I got the modem problem cleared up, I could deal with my second big headache: my router. Routers work by changing the addresses of all your internal PCs (I have 7) into one external address that the rest of the world sees. If you think about it, that means that the router also has to keep an internal table of which PC made which connection to where. Say I connect to Launchpad.net and my son connects to Google.ca, the router has to know that when the responses come back from the internet (remember: they will all be addressed to our ONE external address), the Google responses go to my son and the Launchpad responses go to me. 
Many web sites have lots of ads. When you connect to that site you may transparently be making connections to 20 different other sites for the ad content. The router has to keep track of it. Well guess what? My router had a problem where, after using it for a while, it would start to drop connections. Pings would work, peer-to-peer would still work, but web pages wouldn't. It turns out the firmware on the router had a problem keeping track of different types of connections. A firmware upgrade reduced the frequency of the problem but it's still there. I've got a Netgear router. Check our make and model number and make sure the firmware is up-to-date.

The last thing I've experienced, albeit infrequently, is a problem with
my Hub. As mentioned, I have 7 computers + 2 printers + NDAS storage =
way more ports than my router can handle, so I need a hub or switch.
Being in IT (network admin) I have access to quite a bit of equipment
that is slated for disposal. For that reason I have a pair of 24-port
hubs. The one that I use was trashed because, periodically, it locks up
and won't pass traffic. Unplugging it and plugging it in again solves
this problem.

I thought I'd point these things out. I happen to be "lucky" enough to
be having problems with my modem, router and hub all on the same
network. Some times free equipment isn't always all it's cracked up to
be.

The moral of the story is, that in my experience, when I have a network
issue, I tend to take a good hard look at the equipment (and cables,
btw) before I investigate the operating system. Historically, the
hardware tends to have more bugs in it that the OS does.

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