[shane_c]

The last few weeks I've noticed that our internet has been very slow. It's somewhat tolerable in the morning but by the evening it slows to almost nothing.

I'm not sure if it's related but just before this started I was having issues with my internet not being connected and it would tell me it couldn't connect to the primary DNS server. I would have to unplug the modem for a while and restart the computer a few times but it would eventually connect again.

After that it seemed to get very slow. I broke down last night and called my provider and they didn't see anything wrong at their end and checked the nodes in my area for heavy usage but there wasn't any issues. They asked me to try connecting a laptop and running a speedtest to see if the internet is slow on that too to determine if it's a network or computer problem. I'm going to bring the laptop home from work tomorrow to give that a try.

In the meantime here is what I've done to try and fix things:

The plan I have should give me 20 mbps but in the evenings I'm getting in the 0.3 - 2.5 range. In the morning I was in the 12 range.

1) full virus scan (MSE turned up nothing)
2) disk cleanup
3) defrag
4) updated modem drivers
5) started in safe mode with networking (no difference)
6) ran some Windows 7 updates this morning
7) ran Malwarebytes (didn't turn up anything)

Something I've noticed is that even if I close anything that's open that my CPU usage is around 1-2% but the physical memory usage is close to 50%. The computer is about 1 year old and has 3 GB of RAM. Is this normal? There are around 50 processes running in the background but it's always been like that.

Any other ideas?