Can't download anymore (buffer issues?)

[Daveyboy]

I have an issue with downloading at the moment. Either in Firefox or IE, I click to download something, it does about 20-30% then hangs. Same with flash videos on YouTube or similar.

Sometimes it'll hang while loading a page, but a refresh will sort that out. However, refreshing a video or download just freezes the page or the item downloading.

Someone said that the internet speed may be too much for my computer to take but I think thats rubbish. I'm running a 1.6ghz laptop with 352mb ram. The problem occurs wether i'm hardwired into the wall through an ethernet connection or using wireless and it's the superfast broadband from virgin media (ntl) which I had no problems with in a previous flat.

Any ideas? Is there something I can tweak in the browser?

 

[Jumping]

Have you tried different browsers or other means of downloading like FTP, if you have tried or when you tried it and you still experience the same problem it might be due to some problems with your connection.

Since you have a laptop it should be fairly easy for you to test it on a different connection, take it over to a mate and try downloading something if you get the same problem with a different connection you need to investigate your laptop, new driver search for spyware etc.

If it works fine on a different connection you need to check your connection.

An easy way to test your connection is to start pinging a web site like google from a command line

ping -t www.google.co.uk

This will continusily ping google until you stop it, now start downloading some file and check what happens to your ping when the download fails. If you stop getting ping replies it's a high chance that there is some problem with your line, and you should get in touch with your ISP to get them to investigate your problem.

 

[bloodiedathame]

I'm currently with Virgin Media.

Was originally with Blueyonder, that was awesome. Taken over by Telewest and upgraded to a 4meg connection, which was bloody good. VM took over a month or so ago, and my connection is now utter rubbish (to put it nicely). Always being disconnected, rubbish speeds, pages take ages to load.

Check to see if you have a download limit through VM, I'm not sure if there is but you may be hitting it and thats why it fails to download perhaps?

I'm looking for another ISP.