It won't let me start the remoteaccess service so I don't think I can easily determine the current MTU setting, although I suppose I could mess around with ping sizes ... I'll hold this in reserve
I've already tried that - it was badly fragmented but a defrag made no difference to this problem
It's at 2Gb, which "feels" OK to me
The problem is only with web browsing
I haven't noticed a problem with icons displaying
Ref the original post, there's no issue with CPU usage or HDD thrashing
Yes, and the problem occurs with at least three browsers.
No, only web browsing
There's 2Gb installed
Taskmanager opens quickly and nothing seems to be hogging CPU or memory; there's no HDD thrashing
I tried stopping the AV initially and it didn't seem to make a difference. I may try removing and re-installing it.
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Every year or so I but a new bigger hard disk and an external usb2 hdd caddy, take out the old hard disk and put it in the caddy as a data disk (with everything backed up) then insert the new disk and install a clean new windows xp, update it, put in the few programs i need. make a data partition on it for the data, move my documents etc to the data partition then copy over the data from the external disk, then use the old hard diskt for backups.
[g]
on XP its part of the advanced properties of the Ethernet interface or TCP/IP protocol I think.
Nothing to do with remoteaccess.
control panel->networking and poke around till you find it. Change it reboot and test.
I cant be arsed to boot my XP VM and be more specific.
I should have been clearer. 2GB these days is borderline for having XP work at all once the AV decides to do a background scan. On paper it is supposed not to get in the way but in practice most of them do!
In that case I would suspect you have a virus or trojan. And when attached to the web it is merrily sending itself to all and sundry.
well the ONLY thing I have had that remotely mimics this is the fragementation/MTU issue
I had a purple patch where half the computers here were suffering really slow site access. But ONLY to certain sites, one of which I knew the owner of...he confirmed 'no known issues' and I dropped the MTU down to sub 1430 bytes and the site suddenly went like greased lightning.
Note that all this means is that somewhere on the internet some bits of kit between you and the site aren't playing nice, and all that you lowering the MTU is doing is not giving them the ammunition to fight.
And these problems can be here today and gone tomorrow: At some point I reset all my interfaces to 1500 bytes and things have been fine since.
Which also suggest an interesting way to test the theory, take te PC to a mates house with a different ISP and see if the problem persists.
MSE is configured to do a background scan on certain days but the problem occurs at other times (and with background scan disabled)
taskmanager does not show excessive (i.e. it's virtually no) network traffic
Nope, it doesn't seem to be visible anywhere. Using should display it but this generates an error that the routing and remoteaccess service needs to be started; when I try to start it I get error 1058 "service can not be started"
Sounds like you need to find a new AV program...
(been using an XP machine with 1.75GB for a few years now and not had significant problems with RAM use)
You can check this from a command line by doing:
netstat -a -b
That will list all open network endpoints.
If you do:
netstat -a -b
It will also attempt to resolve which executable owns the endpoint.
(note that its possible a rootkit level compromise could patch the system to disguise connections at this level).
You could also install and run Wireshark to do a capture of the data passing over the machines network interface. That should also show any unexpected network traffic being generated.
It seems that an MTU of 1464 is the highest I can use without packets having to be fragmented BUT in the course of fiddling-about with this I noticed that my wife's XP system was occasionally dropping packets, whereas mine wasn't. I changed the DNS settings to point at some of the better servers that
I think I'll tell her it's fixed and see what happens. I'll report back
The brain cell has woken-up sufficiently to remember how to enable the service so I can now see the MTU setting: it's 1500. I've already shown that the largest unfragmented packet to BBC.CO.UK is 1464 so although it may not be the cause of the problem I'm wasting some performance. I can feel a registry tweak about to flow from my fingertips!
Thanks for pointing me in this direction. It's embarrassing to confess that in years gone by I was a CCNP, CCDP, CCWLANSE (and more) so I *really* should have been able to sort this, but it's all been wiped from my memory :-(
you are manually configuring DNS?
Unless you run your own server, surely the router will proxy for whatever your ISP says to use..and dish itself out as the DNS to use via DHCP?
You don't always want to use the ISPs DNS server. You may like to use one that has access controls built in to block dodgy sites for instance. Or it may just be a cr@p service from the ISP that doesn't reply to some requests (yes virgin I am talking about you).
The BT HomeHub firmware has locked-down the DNS settings on the router so I can't change those. Manually configuring the DNSs seems to have made a big difference, but for good measure I've removed Access Connections and reinstalled the WLAN interface driver.
I still haven't managed to change the MTU size - a manual registry edit had no effect (according to netsh), nor did the MSFT "fixit". Strange!
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