Have I got a virus?

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MontyVeda

a short-tempered ill-controlled small-minded troll
Hi all...

My internet connection is utter pants. Sometimes it's like having an old dial up connection. Pages load without images or stylesheets, if they load at all. I keep getting server not found on Google, the Beeb, Wikipedia. I cannot get my emails via outlook express and I cannot connect to an FTP server... so i guess that discounts an issue with my browser... but just incase I did completely uninstall firefox and reinstalled it, so that's in theory, a 'clean' install.

It drives me nuts and then after anything from 10mins to a couple of hours of connection-crapness... it's absolutely fine.

MY ISP says I've never had any downtime and from their end all is hunky dory.

I've put new cables in between the modem, PC and phone socket, and a new microfilter.
I run AVG free alongside ZoneAlarm for my virus and firewall protection. Running a full system scan draws up nothing, and running spybot search & destry also brings up nothing.

could I have a virus or peice of malware clogging up my connection? And can you recommend any thing I'm not using to try to find it?

Of course it could be other things... I just want to confidently cross this one off the list of possible causes for my intermittent (daily) terrible internet speed.
 

MrJamie

Oaf on a Bike
Assuming you're on ADSL, see if you can paste your line stats from your router on here for people to have a look at, preferably once while the line is good and once while its bad, but anything would be good :smile:

Also if you think its malware you could try booting into safemode (with networking), tap F6 repeatedly right after the bios screens but before the windows logo screen and you should get a boot menu. You can also try running Internet Explorer (no addons) from somewhere in the start menu - probably programs>accessories, maybe in system tools.
 

ColinJ

Puzzle game procrastinator!
I'm staying with a friend at the moment and experiencing the same kind of thing and I suspect her router is the problem. I can sometimes get rid of the problems by rebooting it and then it works fine for a random period of time (minutes to hours).

When I feel better (I'm ill) I intend to go home for my router and see whether that works reliably here. That would determine whether the problem was the router or not.
 

Stonepark

Über Member
Location
Airth
first of all, log into your router and look at the status page and post the stats on connection speed of connection, signal to noise ratio and line attenuation
 

berty bassett

Legendary Member
Location
I'boro
check internet connection speed on google - i was paying for upto 8 meg on sky and getting a whopping 0.2 - when i phoned up for help , the very helpful indian told me to only go on internet between 12 and 3 am to get a faster speed !!! thanks sky ! never never never ever again
 

accountantpete

Brexiteer
I had the same for about a week until the local BT systrem crashed - been absolutely fine since.

You could consider Combofix - it's very thorough but might quarantine something innocent so there are plenty of warnings about its use. I've used it a few times without problem
 

Davidc

Guru
Location
Somerset UK
Try improving the phone line filtering - do it at the master socket where the line comes into the building

Get the connection speed from the ADSL modem/router. Then get the actual speed from one of the web tools (see above)

If the connection speed is poor speak to your ISP.

If the actual speed is much lower than the connection speed think about moving to a small business package with an ISP which can provide it, with a low contention ratio (25 is good). it won't cost a lot more than a domestic deal but will greatly improve performance.
 

trampyjoe

Senior Member
Location
South Shropshire
AVG and Zonealarm both have live scanning from what I remember (mind you it's been a while since I last delt with stuff like this)which would slow your connection down, so try either tweaking the settings on them or temporarily turning them off to see if that makes any difference.
 
Malwarebytes (free download from http://www.malwarebytes.org/) is pretty darn good at picking up and removing malware other programmes don't reach.
 

LCpl Boiled Egg

Three word soundbite
This may seem a strange question, but do you have microfilters in all your telephone sockets, including ones that have nothing plugged into them? Apparently you should have them in all sockets.
 

ColinJ

Puzzle game procrastinator!
This may seem a strange question, but do you have microfilters in all your telephone sockets, including ones that have nothing plugged into them? Apparently you should have them in all sockets.
I can't see any point in filtering unused sockets!

I had a couple of cheapo filters which didn't do the job properly and replaced them with more expensive ones which did. (The originals were so bad that they knocked out Caller Display on my phones!)
 

LCpl Boiled Egg

Three word soundbite
I can't see any point in filtering unused sockets!

I had a couple of cheapo filters which didn't do the job properly and replaced them with more expensive ones which did. (The originals were so bad that they knocked out Caller Display on my phones!)

Yeah, me neither, but I seem to remember one of the phone companies using that as an excuse to not give technical support. Until you'd filled up all the sockets with these things they didn't want to know. MontyVeda says that a new microfilter was used, so the old one could be put in another socket if that situation arose.
 
OP
OP
MontyVeda

MontyVeda

a short-tempered ill-controlled small-minded troll
cheers for the tips guys... I'll work through 'em over the weekend.

The microfilter thing sounds typical of an ISP, only got one socket so that's not an issue (even if true). My ISP also told me to replace the LAN cable and the one between the modem and socket... worked a treat... for a few hours then all went south again. False positives i guess. I'm trying everything before i end up trying a full reinstall, or buying a new PC, neither of which i want to do.
 
OP
OP
MontyVeda

MontyVeda

a short-tempered ill-controlled small-minded troll
progress... not.

I can log into cyclechat and type this message... but i keep getting "the connection has timed out" when trying to log into my router. (192.168.2.1 according to my saved logins)

Bearing in mind my router is 1.2 metres away from my PC... and the cyclechat server is somewhat further away... would that mean its definitely a local issue? Something on my PC and not just a crap connection.

I can mend things if know what's wrong but fault diagnosis is not my strong point. :smile:

I'm just downloading Malwarebytes and will see if that finds anything
 

MrJamie

Oaf on a Bike
Either try IE-no addons (start->programs->accessories->system tools) or reboot to safemode with networking and see if that changes anything.

Do you have any other pcs/smartphones etc using the connection?
 
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