Weird XP issue

Michael.J.Palmer

So I started working at one of the busiest repair shops in town earlier in the week and I was given the task to take one of the PC's in the back and just bring it up to speed with updates and some anti-virus so they can sell it. Well, that's not such a hard task right, wrong, I've hit a snag and need some help here as it's really kinda weird.

I googled it to see if there was a common issue with the mobo and there doesn't appear to be any. It's a computer that has a Via Technology Pheonix mobo (not sure of the exact specs off the top of my head right now). Anyways, to the issue.

When it's connected to the network I can access web pages perfectly fine, but when I go to download something I get weird fluctuations with the downloads. I was trying to load AVG on it and when it came to the AVG Download Manager to run it continually fluctuated the download ETA as the status bar very slowly crept along. The download continued to error out before it'd reach the end. Of course that's not all of it, I can't get the Windows Updates to run, I'll get the page to load but when I hit to check for updates (both express and custom) I get an error saying that it couldn't complete the task.

I've checked the NIC by running the loopback to see if I got any hickups as far as return speeds (like the downloads were getting) and I even did a tracert ping to try and see if it bounced back weirdly. It all seems to work fine though I'm almost certain that it has to be some sort of NIC issue. Has anyone else ever encountered an issue like this? I've had NICs fail on me but never do weird stuff like this. Everything else btw runs fine on it, and I don't think it's a network issue in the store simply because everything else is running fine as well.

Any help is greatly appreciated, just wanted to pick some other brains before I decided to go through the trouble of telling the owner that we may need a new NIC in it.

dynamik

Spyware? Try SpyBot/AdAware/etc.

Might be necessary to reset the TCP/IP stack: How to reset Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)

phoeneous

Anything exciting in eventvwr?

Michael.J.Palmer

Here's the fun part, it's a fresh install of XP, so there isn't any chance of spyware and what not. From what I can tell I was the first person to plug it to the network after the fresh install. I'll check the event log on Monday, didn't think about that acutally which is kinda stupid of me, lol.

genXrcist

Easy enough to verify, put another NIC in and see what that does. Perhaps there's a problem with the MoBo interface that the NIC is inserted into? The symptoms you described sound like a possible I/O issue but since you said everything else is fine that leads me to believe it could be the interface.

You could also setup a P2P connection with another PC and see what send/receive speeds you get when moving files between shares.

Good luck!

Michael.J.Palmer

It's an onboard NIC so it can't be an PCI interface issue, I'll set up a share on Monday and see what it does. Thanks for the replies, at least I know I'm not crazy by thinking it's a NIC issue. I've been out of regular work for about four months so I'm still getting used to the grind of actually going to work, tack onto that the fact that I'm up most nights with a newborn and my brain just isn't functioning on all cylinders right now hense why I wanted to pick some other brains here for some support.

I'll check the event viewer on Monday, see if the Windows Update errors logged anything there. I'll check the transfer rates between one PC and another on the same network, likewise I'm gonna check the download rate through something like Ping Test or what not online and see what kind of registered reading I get from there. And if all else fails and I still get no concrete answer, I'll throw another NIC in and see what I get from that. Thanks for the help guys, after this past week it's definitely a lot easier for me to break everything down after discussing it with you guys.

Thanks again.