New Desktop Tower

[lewdog]

I'm in need of a new desktop computer tower. I have a 20" Samsung monitor so I only need the tower. My current HP is about 7 years old and the display driver keeps crashing, even when uninstalling and installing again, it's running slow, and crashes multiple browsers on a consistent basis.

The max I want to spend is $500. I don't play games on it but I do stream sports. Other than that, I don't use it much for anything but browsing the net.

I'm not a tech guy so any help would be appreciated in pointing me to something that will perform well without breaking the bank.

[lewdog]

Originally Posted by patteeu

OK, then it's probably not the modem. But sometimes it's not obvious that you're changing your usage habits. For example, if you stream video, sometimes the quality of the stream is auto-selected so you might have had some lower res stream before and HD now. Of course, that only happens if your internet speeds are marginal (like mine out in the country). You're probably on one of those high-falutin' city firehose lines with mega speed where you've always streamed in HD.

I think we are supposed to be about 45mbps but when I speed test we run about 30mbps.

However, with the old computer being wacky I did stream MLB games on a lower quality and I started watching the HD baseball stream with the new computer. I still don't see how a 3 hour MLB game in HD would ring up 80GB though?

[hometeam]

Originally Posted by lewdog

I think we are supposed to be about 45mbps but when I speed test we run about 30mbps.

However, with the old computer being wacky I did stream MLB games on a lower quality and I started watching the HD baseball stream with the new computer. I still don't see how a 3 hour MLB game in HD would ring up 80GB though?

So, 30mb down is aprox 3mb/sec - if your HQ stream uses all of the available bandwidth (not out of the question for 3mb/sec dl speed) your going to consume almost 31 gigs in 3 hours. So yes, that could be it.

What kind of shit provider caps you at 250gb? The internet situation in this country is ****ed up.

[lewdog]

Originally Posted by hometeam

So, 30mb down is aprox 3mb/sec - if your HQ stream uses all of the available bandwidth (not out of the question for 3mb/sec dl speed) your going to consume almost 31 gigs in 3 hours. So yes, that could be it.

What kind of shit provider caps you at 250gb? The internet situation in this country is ****ed up.

Out here you have two choices. Cox and Century link. Both are equally ****ing shitty. They cap you and send threatening emails until you upgrade to a much more expensive plan with faster internet and more data. It's pretty ****ing stupid.

I still can't imagine that 3 hours of baseball and maybe two hours of internet browsing between my wife and I would cause 80GB of use in a day when we were only using about 4GB a day doing the same thing. We both work away from home and are gone most of the day. Not to mention that the spike occurred when we setup the new computer but with the old and new modem both! This is baffling me.

[hometeam]

Any possibility you got infected with a botnet worm and someone is using your PC as a DDOS zombie?

[lewdog]

Originally Posted by hometeam

Any possibility you got infected with a botnet worm and someone is using your PC as a DDOS zombie?

Well we ran Kaspersky on both our computers and no threats were found. Uninstalled the wi-fi router and re-installed it while changing the password. Eliminated the guest account for the wi-fi.

Anything else I should do to find if that happened or how I would tell?

Any reason a new computer would cause such an issue? This seriously started the exact day we set it up.

[hometeam]

Originally Posted by lewdog

Well we ran Kaspersky on both our computers and no threats were found. Uninstalled the wi-fi router and re-installed it while changing the password. Eliminated the guest account for the wi-fi.

Anything else I should do to find if that happened or how I would tell?

Any reason a new computer would cause such an issue? This seriously started the exact day we set it up.

new computer should not unless it has a program on it that sucking bandwidth. I highly, highly doubt it is a hardware issue.

[lewdog]

Originally Posted by hometeam

new computer should not unless it has a program on it that sucking bandwidth. I highly, highly doubt it is a hardware issue.

I can't either. It's just a weird timing thing that this happened on the exact day we starting using it.

I'll give it a few days and check our usage. Everyone in this thread has been a big help.

[TheUte]

Try TCP view. It's a small download and provides some good info.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb897437.aspx

TCPView is a Windows program that will show you detailed listings of all TCP and UDP endpoints on your system, including the local and remote addresses and state of TCP connections. On Windows Server 2008, Vista, and XP, TCPView also reports the name of the process that owns the endpoint. TCPView provides a more informative and conveniently presented subset of the Netstat program that ships with Windows. The TCPView download includes Tcpvcon, a command-line version with the same functionality.

[lewdog]

Back under 4GB of usage for a day since switching the security on the router. 2GB on Friday and 4GB yesterday which included watching the Royals. Hopefully that was all it was.

[notorious]

Your computer has those AIDS already?