PC/network problem: Internet timing out frequently

[Fuzz]

I have Qwest DSL at home with three PCs connecting through a router (both wired and wireless).

Everything had been running fine for several years, until Saturday night, when the internet started timing out on one PC only. Every 5-10 seconds. It'll load pages/sites fine, and then suddenly time out for another 5-10 seconds, and then be fine again. I'm getting the same behavior connecting just to my router. No such problem on the other machines. Here's my setup:

Desktop 1 (problem PC):
Dell, Pentium 3GHz,1GB RAM
WinXP Home
Wired to Belkin router
Running ZoneAlarm Security Suite 7.0

Desktop 2:
ABS, AMD 2GHz(?),768MB RAM
WinXP Home
Wireless to Belkin router
Running ZoneAlarm Security Suite 7.0

Laptop:
HP Centrino Dual, 2.3GHz,3.4GB RAM
WinXP Pro
Wireless and wired to Belkin router

Here's what I tried:

• Switched the ethernet cable connecting Desktop 1 to router. No change.
• Switched the cable and port (on router) connecting Desktop 1 to router. No change.
• Shut off Zonealarm completely. No change.

Attached are my Dr. TCP settings.

There may be one culprit. I had installed uTorrent on Thursday night. The timeouts started happening on Saturday evening even though uTorrent was not running/loaded. Thinking uTorrent was somehow messing something up, I uninstalled it, but still no change.

Any ideas on what I need to do to correct this?

[Snow Dog]

uTorrent and ZoneAlarm don't play well together. I always turn off ZoneAlarm when using uTorrent. uTorrent also hammered my router until I updated the firmware. It's not really a uTorrent issue -- it's the large volume of packets that gets generated. Some home routers can't deal with the volume.

If you haen't already, reset (power off) your DSL modem and router. Since a computer is identified by its MAC address moving the wires doesn't do anything.

[wi3dzmin]

Reboot the router.
Reboot the DSL modem.

[Fuzz]

Well, rebooting the router did the trick. I had rebooted the modem before but that didn't do anything.

So what happened? I used to run BitComet for torrents before and it never created this kind of a problem. Is there something about uTorrent? Why would just this one PC suddenly behave like this, while the other machines using the same router work fine?

[wi3dzmin]

Possibly this:

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=6048

[RShea]

As for why the power off of the router seemed to fix the problem, if you still had the Torrent software uninstalled, then the wired portion of the router could have had issues that the power cycle solved. If you put the Torrent software back on and this is the only unit that has the issue, it still could be related to something in the router (since this is the only non-wireless connection), it also could be something with the TCP/IP DHCP address lease (assume you have the router issuing addresses to all the PC's). Next time instead of doing a screen shot of the TCP screen you did, try start, run, cmd ... then when the box appears do ipconfig /all and see what the settings are showing. Should be probably a 192.168.x.x address were x.x could be something like 1.100 or whatever. Then do an ipconfig /release and follow with ipconfig /renew after the prompt comes back. Then try again to connect and see if it is any better.

Other possibles include the fact that you were running a Torrent and something got downloaded and infected the PC (virus, spyware, etc.) But that will not be solved with any of the above steps, or the power cycling you did to the router- power cycling the router is like a reboot/restart for a slow PC.