Internet Bandwidth / Speed Issues
Alright, I've been to these forums several times before under a different user name, which I apparently lack the password too, but I will assure, I have do have some knowledge of spy/ad/malware and viruses, and a grasp of the technology I'm working with.
Now, onto the issue.
Quite simply, my connection blows. This is based on certain times of day, in the afternoon it's a bit sluggish, morning it's fine, but past 7PM PST, all hell breaks loose. In any application I run that can give ping speed, I'm reaching into the 200-350MS range, which I find quite despicable. As you probably have guessed, these "internet applications" are of course games and voice chat programs. Now, the first reaction I had was that our upgraded internet service from the same ISP was having it a little rough. But after looking at the numbers the connection provides, I'm not too convinced. It's a 4 mb/s cable connection (download), with 768KB/S upload bandwidth. We're paying good money for it; and the damned thing is slow as hell once the evening rolls around. The power of the connection makes me think I might have been hijacked. One of my siblings installed WebSearch on our upstairs computer; and I fear the worst, that the connection has been hijacked and that I'm being used as some download server. I removed all the WebSearch garbage, started simple, checked the processes, made note of the bad ones, uninstalled all the stuff from add/remove programs, and rebooted. Surprisingly enough, all the bad apps had disappeared from the process list, and I was quite pleased. I still ran a SpyBot check and took a quick look over the HJ log, and nothing of notable interest popped up, that I was able to recognize, at least. I'll post that log when I head up there in a minute. This computer, as far as I can tell, is clean. I'll post the HJ log of course, just to see if there's something I'm missing. If there's nothing that you folks can find, then I'm probably going to call my ISP and whine to them. A lot.
Also, another observation I have made is that the "recieving" light as well as the light on my router for the connection are constantly blinking as though in full use, when I am currently using no applications drawing on the connection, which I find very odd. Probably nothing though.