Blueyonder woes

[sparky68]

hi all,
New member here so Hello everyone

wondering if someone could help with a problem my mother in law is having.
first off i live in the south and she lives in Newcastle so all communication is by phone to her.

her problem is when she opens a web page or trys to it can take upto 10-15mins, she cant receive email but she CAN send them ?
she has been onto blueyonder and they say its her pc which im pretty sure its not after getting her to check for virus's spyware cleaning caches and so on..

a ping and tracert gives this which to me says it IS a network fault???

Pinging www.bbc.net.uk [212.58.227.78] with 32 bytes of data:

Request timed out.
Reply from 212.58.227.78: bytes=32 time=41ms TTL=244
Reply from 212.58.227.78: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=244
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 212.58.227.78:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 2, Lost = 2 (50% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 30ms, Maximum = 41ms, Average = 35ms

C:\Documents and Settings\MAZ>tracert www.bbc.co.uk

Tracing route to www.bbc.net.uk [212.58.226.232]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 8 ms * 14 ms 10.96.64.1
2 8 ms * * 62.31.144.229
3 * * * Request timed out.
4 24 ms 21 ms 23 ms lee-bb-a-so-310-0.inet.ntl.com [213.105.175.165]

5 29 ms 29 ms 27 ms nth-bb-b-so-100-0.inet.ntl.com [62.253.185.101]

6 25 ms * 30 ms nth-bb-a-so-400-0.inet.ntl.com [213.105.172.193]

7 44 ms * 45 ms gfd-bb-b-so-010-0.inet.ntl.com [62.253.185.98]
8 * 21 ms 37 ms redb-ic-1-so-700-0.inet.ntl.com [62.253.185.78]

9 152 ms * * 212.58.238.189
10 24 ms 26 ms * 212.58.238.149
11 27 ms * 23 ms 212.58.238.157
12 * 24 ms 24 ms 212.58.226.232

Trace complete.


can anyone shed some light on this please?

Mark

---------- Post added at 12:09 ---------- Previous post was at 12:06 ----------

oh and she is using a Motorola surfboard sb5101

[7@m3 G33k]

Hi Mark

First off ping is a bit of a blunt instrument for determining the nature of slow net connections. In fact lot of big sites just disable ping-response as it can be used to initiate a simple denial of service attack against them. As for the tracert results they look pretty normal to me.

Is it slow when she goes to NTL/VM's web pages? If she uses a POP3 mail client is that slow downloading new messages? Test the latter by sending her a large (1Mb) attachement. Is it slow if she browses to the Surfboard's config pages?

[sparky68]

hi there sorry been on holiday since posting..thanks for your reply.

ive just spoke to her and she finally got a manager to phone her back and he insisted that its not the modem or cabling and that it HAS to be her PC??
i got her to run winmtr and it shows great ping times but packet loss of between 33% - 50%
now im no expert but i cant see that this is spyware/virus or a trojan ? could i be wrong

she can send email but not receive it either??? weird.

[7@m3 G33k]

Originally Posted by sparky68

hi there sorry been on holiday since posting..thanks for your reply.

ive just spoke to her and she finally got a manager to phone her back and he insisted that its not the modem or cabling and that it HAS to be her PC??
i got her to run winmtr and it shows great ping times but packet loss of between 33% - 50%
now im no expert but i cant see that this is spyware/virus or a trojan ? could i be wrong

she can send email but not receive it either??? weird.

No need to apologise - hope you had a good break!

The packet loss is obviously the best clue here - that would certainly explain slow loading of web pages and failure to receive mail. I'm not much of an ethernet geek so I suggest you dig deeper into the kinds of packet loss and the possible causes - a quick googling found this. On the face of it might be useful but I'm sure you can turn up other useful stuff by being a little more thorough.

As for what to try the obvious things without any additional info would be a new ethernet cable, updating ethernet drivers, ethernet card settings, a new ethernet card...you know - all that stuff that's so easy to talk a novice user through from the other end of the country! I sympathise

[amateurfool]

Another thing to bear in mind with regards to diagnostics using ICMP (Ping, Traceroute, etc...) is a lot of core routers (the big kit that ISP's use) will also drop ICMP traffic when under high load, so that resources can be better used dealing with other traffic.

---------- Post added at 11:05 ---------- Previous post was at 10:59 ----------

Originally Posted by sparky68

ive just spoke to her and she finally got a manager to phone her back and he insisted that its not the modem or cabling and that it HAS to be her PC??
i got her to run winmtr and it shows great ping times but packet loss of between 33% - 50%
now im no expert but i cant see that this is spyware/virus or a trojan ? could i be wrong

Depends, a heavily infected pc can suffer performance problems.

I recall doing a pc repair a couple of years ago, the pc took 15 minutes to boot, 5 minutes to open a web browser, and forever timed out opening pages, turned out that the pc had a total of 1400+ separate malware infections which maxed out the CPU and available memory.

Originally Posted by sparky68

she can send email but not receive it either??? weird.

Not necessarily, how long does it take to send a basic email.

I would suggest having a look at CPU/Memory load.

[sparky68]

Ok guys
im the first to admit i was wrong
it was her antivirus software NOD32.. ive always used it and had no problems but uninstalling it from her PC cured the problem straight off, how weird ??

thanks for your replys though, much appreciated.

Mark

[7@m3 G33k]

Originally Posted by sparky68

Ok guys
im the first to admit i was wrong
it was her antivirus software NOD32.. ive always used it and had no problems but uninstalling it from her PC cured the problem straight off, how weird ??

thanks for your replys though, much appreciated.

Mark

I've not used NOD32 and I don't know anyone who has. She has installed another AV product I hope? Personally I use Avast - free for domestic use and I've had no problems with it.

[amateurfool]

Cool, good to hear it's solved.