crabdog

Things are getting even weirder now. I shall endeavor to explain without boring you to death..

Tried ToT and TRUE speed test on my other computer which is running Linux. Both showed nominal speeds. Tried again on this machine and they both timed out as before. I then switched this computer to the TRUE connection and got good results. For some reason only this computer is timing out on the tests and only on the ToT connection (which I have determined is working fine).

So that's how things are at the moment. It's software related, not hardware or connection. I'm running a malwarebytes scan at the moment and will check the results in the morning. If I can't figure it out I can always reformat and be back up in no time. It's just the curiosity that has my mind working overtime with it and the challenge to hunt down the cause of this unusual behavior.

One more thing I forgot to mention and don't know if it's relevant but none of the advertisement images are loading on this page, I'm just getting the little sad page face (am not running adblocker).

Changing DNS did not fix anything unfortunately.

I was able to download a large file (2.2GB) rather quickly with Internet Download Manager. The speed got up to 2MB/sec but was very erratic. Same download without IDM was timing out and going nowhere.

Feels as if I'm under scrutiny from the watchdogs. Geez I'm getting paranoid now.

Strangely the tracerts appear normal. I'd even go as far as to say they look great. However webpages have been sluggish all day and have not been able to stream with TVMC either. On the speed test pages the ping test looks good and then it times out during the download test. Really strange behavior.

I'm going to manually set DNS and see if that makes a difference.

I see it's your turn.

What does a tracert reveal?

Thought I should add: my TRUE adsl connection is getting full speed on both of those speed tests.

Strangely my pings are still good (130ms to Australia) but opening websites has been dreadfully slow all day. Speed test on ToT's own site and TRUE just timed out LOL.

Anyone else with ToT experiencing this?

If they acquiesced so easily to installing Windows 8, and for free, it is probably going to be a bogus copy as well.

Exactly this ^

There's no way in the world they're going to give you a 3000+ baht OS with no charge and besides that, they will most likely install the same crapware as the previous setup unless you specifically ask them not to. Either buy a legit copy of Windows or accept having a bogus one with possible blocked updates (unless you can install it yourself).

Also agree with the other poster above who said that the current partitioning is fine. The C: drive should be used primarily for Windows and other insignificant installs (VLC, anti-virus, Chrome etc) while other programs / data / games should be installed / saved onto another partition. In the event that Windows has a major failure your data will remain safe on a separate partition.

If for whatever reason you decide to keep the machine I would suggest you do a fresh install of Windows. Disabling updates is the 'idiots' way of loading pirated operating system and besides you probably don't need / want half the other crap that they installed on it.

I'd recommend finding out if the hard drive is in fact new and if so do a fresh install. If the hard drive is not new take that notebook back and demand a refund or an SSD in exchange for the old drive. Also recommend that in the future you purchase from a recognized store ie JIB, Banana IT, Advice computer etc.

Sounds like you signed up for their "free" trial which required entering your credit card details. Since you did not cancel before the "trial" period expired you're now receiving recurring charges.

Personally I'd probably take the risk and go for the change just for the extra upload speed but it sounds as though your 3BB setup works better than average. If you don't need to upload anything it's probably better to stick with 3BB.

I replaced the 640GB HD in my laptop with a 1TB SSD. Night and day difference. In addition to a much faster boot time, everything else is faster too. But the biggest improvement has been the complete lack of BSOD occurances, something I used to get 2 or 3 times a week with the HD.

I haven't had a BSOD since I moved to Win7, thru Win8.1 and now Win10. Am I just lucky?

(Vista truly sucked, XP was fine after years of dialing it in, but the first couple of years were rough. Got MUCH better when I uninstalled all things Symantec, though they didn't make that easy..)

Thanks for the input. I'm off for an SSD tomorrow, hoping more than 1/2 of Fortune Town is open.

Got any brand recommendations, or are they all "the same"?

Samsung EVO long been regarded as the best SSD for price/performance.

1) A TV with HDMI.

2) A laptop / PC with TVMC installed.

3) Internet connection.

Done.

All normal for me here in Nonthaburi.

JIB Computer is a good place to go as they will put your build together for you and there are plenty of JIB shops around / near Bangkok.

As for what to buy, I'd really need some more information as to what kind of gaming you intend to do. If it's for DOTA2 or League of Legends etc you don't need much power to run them. However if you want to play first person shooters or just any new game that takes your fancy then you will need something a bit more substantial. What games did you have in mind?

Also is the budget you gave for everything including monitor, keyboard etc or do you have those already?

I just bought call of duty 3 And my computer can barely run it. So i figured its time to get a new one had this one for almost 3 years. And its on the last chapter.

I got one offer from one page mentioned earlier in this tread.

CPU: INTEL CORE I5-6400 SKYLAKE

M/B: GIGABYTE GA-H170M-HD3 DDR3 SOCKET LGA1151 / H170 / 2 X DDR3 / 6 X SATA 6GBS / 1 X M.2 / MATX

gpu: GIGABYTE NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX960 2GB GDDR5 G1 GAMING

RAM: KINGSTON HYPERX FURY 16GB (2X8GB) DDR3 1600MHZ CL10 NON-ECC DIMM BLACK (HX316C10FBK2/16)

SSD: KINGSTON 120GB HYPERX SAVAGE SSD 2.5" SATA (SHSS37A/120G)

HDD: TOSHIBA 1TB 7200RPM 3.5" SATA 6GB/S 32MB CACHE

Case: COOLER MASTER N200 COMPUTER CASE FITS MICRO-ATX BLACK

PSU: SILVERSTONE STRIDER ESSENTIAL 600W POWER SUPPLY 80 PLUS

31, 000 they fix all and deliver to me.

What you think? Sorry about caps but to lazy to rewrite.

That's not a bad setup but there are a couple of things I would change:

1) The motherboard only supports DDR3. Nearly all Skylake builds support DDR4 which would make your system more future-proof.

2) The Nvidia GTX960 is on the lower end of current video cards.

3) That PSU doesn't look so great according to this review https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Silverstone/ST60F-ESB/11.html but it would probably be okay for above system.

Since the price quoted is well under your budget limit I would suggest upgrading the GPU to a GTX770 or AMD R9 390. After all the GPU is the heart and soul of a gaming rig. I would also consider changing out the motherboard for one that supports DDR4.

I believe the OP has his knickers in a twist over one or more bad experiences with anti-virus in the past. Seems to be overreacting pretty majorly though. I find most of the anti-virus solutions today are mostly non-intrusive and just sit quietly in the taskbar doing their thing.

If you're worried about them slowing down your system then you either 1) have more than one running simultaneously on the same machine, 2) have an ancient / very low powered PC or 3) made a poor choice of anti-virus software. Keep in mind also that that many of the "extra features" of anti-virus programs are optional (parental control, safe site search etc) and can be disabled in the settings.

It's true that most online threats can be avoided with common sense but unfortunately a lot of people are lacking in that or are just inexperienced with computers. Even with a good security setup in place an idiot can still get themself into all kinds of problems.

As for "you like to allow rundll.dll?" I haven't come across anything like this for many, many years, due either to improvements in software or possibly my substantial personal experience since then. Were you running on maximum protection / paranoid mode when that happened?

JIB Computer is a good place to go as they will put your build together for you and there are plenty of JIB shops around / near Bangkok.

As for what to buy, I'd really need some more information as to what kind of gaming you intend to do. If it's for DOTA2 or League of Legends etc you don't need much power to run them. However if you want to play first person shooters or just any new game that takes your fancy then you will need something a bit more substantial. What games did you have in mind?

Also is the budget you gave for everything including monitor, keyboard etc or do you have those already?

It should be fine for what you're planning to do with it. If you want more gaming options you could go for something with an i5 and slightly better graphics like the 960m

The HP Pavilion looks okay but a new i7 should really be paired with 8GB of RAM. Also the hard drive is 5400 which is painfully slow. Fortunately both of those can be upgraded later by adding another stick of RAM and a SSD. The RAM would probably be okay as is unless you're planning to do Photoshop or video editing etc but for basic use is adequate. I would definitely recommend the SSD though.

It's looooong been known that upgrading an OS is much more likely to result in problems than a clean install. I would suggest you backup anything important, format and do a fresh install. Your Win 10 activation is tied to your hardware so even after a format you'll have activation. Seems logical to me but after reading the above posts it's pretty clear that most of the people having problems have no real knowledge of their computer whatsoever but if you're game have a shot at it.

I am saying if they could run windows 10 .. that means quite heavy resources. So a relatively new computer.

Not really. Windows 10 can run old computers or with very light configuration (ARM processor / 2gb RAM / 10 GB Hard disk). I'm just more comfortable with Win 7 and uncomfortable with some privacy issues with Win 10

Less than a minute on google will point you to bundles of free programs or instructions that deal with Win 10 "privacy issues". Even done manually it takes less than 5 minutes.

Have not owned any products from either HP or Acer but this site would suggest that HP is better:

http://www.laptopmag.com/articles/laptop-brand-ratings

However, many people would say that it depends on the model more than the brand.

Definitely go for 1920x1080.

1366x768 is an antiquated resolution and does not look anywhere near as crisp.

Heck even the iPhone 6 Plus has 1920x1080 at 401 ppi.

BREAKING NEWS:

Today for the first time since "the incident" roughly 4 weeks ago, I'm getting pings of 30-40 ms to (game) servers in Singapore and 180 ms to Australia. Not quite as good as it was before but very close. Strangely I'm still getting Latency: 237 ms to Singapore on the TRUE speed test and I'm not sure why that is happening.

TRUE connection is unchanged, still pinging about 210 ms to Australia, when before it used to be about 150 ms.

Right now at least, I'm a happy camper.

Are you using a wired or wifi connection? As doccalamity said, wireless interference can hinder speeds a lot.

Latency: 327 ms

Jitter: 1 ms

Latency: 50 ms

Jitter: 1 ms

Are the above two results received by the same device?

Or two different devices?

They are the same device (desktop pc). All I have to do is change my Ethernet cable from the ToT router to the TRUE router, both of which sit on my computer desk.