I Will Never Understand ComputersFollow

**Please forgive me for bumping this thread, I have new information that might be pertinent to the situation as I have been entirely unable to solve it and the massive traffic of the oboards tech forum has prevented me from receiving any help there at all. Please see bottom of the original post for the updated details.


Last night I started typing up a longer version of this story but ultimately deleted it for reasons I'm not quite sure. Here I shall be presenting a shorter version with the purpose of skipping all the fluff and just getting to the point of it all.

A week or so ago my connection to WoW began to become extremely poor. While doing the Quel'Danas dailies on my lv 70 hunter I noticed it. Every time I would attack something I would disconnect. Through discussion of addons one of my guildmates suggested it might be the Zhuntermod addon I was using, so I disabled it and the problem seemed to go away. Later on when I'd finished the dailies I went and found an up to date version of the mod and turned it back on and experienced no issue.

However, the problem wasn't over. In Kara a few days later I experienced a number of odd disconnects from the game. What's stranger is I would also get disconnected from Ventrillo at times that did not always coincide with my disconnects from WoW. Either way I was back online in seconds and I never held the raid group back.

But still it continued. A few days later in heroic Slave Pens the same thing as Kara would happen. Talking with another guildmate in Vent he suggested it might be my home's connection to the internet dropping at random times. I inquired with other family members but nobody else was having trouble with their internet. Hell, I sit in front of two computers all the time. And only my WoW computer was having the issue. The other one was and still is fine.

And the problem still progressed worse. Two days ago I went to put a GM call in and, when selecting the Technical category I started reading some of the info there when I saw the bit about how certain antivirus programs might create connection issues after a patch. Thinking that was it I took McAfee out and put my registered copy of Spysweeper in. Yet...the problem continued! What makes it worse, the problem doesn't appear WoW related because it has also been affecting my ability to properly update my Spysweeper program to the most up to date version. Every time I try to update the connection times out within one minute. Yet...my disconnects from WoW were never in one minute intervals, nor were my disconnects from Ventrillo.

I got the idea that something might be overheating, so I moved the tower over, took the side off and put a fan. And my connectivity to WoW seemed to improve. But I was still unable to update my Spysweeper as the connection to the internet would constantly reset. After a while though I began to see that the fan was not helping whatsoever.

Tonight, trying to do some Ogrila/Skyguard dailies in BEM I found that my hunter, the moment he would get anywhere near the Simon Says devices for the Relic Emanations quest, would disconnect. In fact, upon logging in he would immediately disconnect again and I could not maintain a steady connection to the game until I hearthed out. I returned to BEM and, oddly enough, same thing happened. I get near the Simon Says devices, either north or south, and my connection dies.

To make this all the more confusing, through ALL of this...my lv 66 druid never disconnects. Not at the rate my hunter has been. And both characters use almost identical addons with Zhuntermod being the one exception. I can quest for hours through all of this on my druid, log onto my hunter and be disconnecting in five minutes.

And to think...this is the short version of the story. Does anyone have any idea WTF is going on? How could one character, using identical addons, have such extreme connectivity issues that another character does not...issues that seem to extend to other programs on the computer?

Again, I ask you all. WTF???

Edit: A few days ago I completely reinstalled and patched WoW from scratch (took like 7 hours). This did not fix the issue. So today I went to Best Buy and bought a Linksys wireless adapter. Configured it with the CD, plugged it in and got my connection going. Seemed fine at first, did a Dead Scar bombing daily without a single issue and thought all was well. But then I went to Kara and got permanently stuck in the room just before Curator. Disconnect from server, log back in, disconnect instantly again. I was only able to not get kicked when I started heading back towards the exit and was a good distance from the rest of the raid.

Hit upon the idea that I might need to update the driver of my Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT graphics card. Yet here I am, attempting to DL it and I absolutely cannot. It refuses to entirely DL, just like when I tried to update Spysweeper. So I'm thinking it still might not be WoW at all but something else within my computer. Or it could be WoW because the oboards tech forums are absolutely flooded with numerous threads of issues that sound suspiciously like mine.

Does anyone have any idea at all? I'm desperate for resolution.

Edited, Apr 23rd 2008 3:53am by Tavarde

Edited, May 1st 2008 5:02am by Tavarde

I Will Never Understand Computers --> and that is just a good thing :) = more work for me.

About the dc problems. I have the same thing. When I am in high populated area I usually get disconnected. I am almost sure that the problem is my Internet connection. It should be 1M / 1M = but in time to time it is not(I use testers and so one).

What I suggest you to do is check your real Internet speed. Google --> Insternet speed test.

If everything is ok, drop all your game settings to minimum and give it a try. If still problems we have few things to do.

1. Take your computer to your friens place and try with his/hers Internet connection.
2. If still problems, try play with your friends conputer. -> if no problems, you have a problem in your PC. If not -->
3. Open reclamation to Blizzard.

But anyway, that is just one way to go, there are others but that is what I would do. Except I have more that 1PC and I can test wow also in office.

Might I also suggest getting ahold of your provider and asking tech support what might be the problem...maybe if you renew your IP, update all your add-ons and such it may make the difference. if anything they can tell you what your pinging and whether the node is ok.

And you still havent changed your provider?

Normally I would have, but im living in a shared house, the landlord is tied into a 12 month contract and is not willing to pay the cancelation fee so im stuck untill they resolve the problem :/

When you get dumped from WoW or Vent, can you still surf the net? Have you tried running a long cycled ping to see if you are running into packetloss issues? What I would recommend would be the following, based on some of my clients who have had issues similar to this:

1. Run a ping test to see what your overall latency is. To do this, go to Start - Run - type "cmd" and click "ok". Once you have the command prompt up, type "ping www.google.com -n 100" then enter (or whatever site you want to use). Let this run in the background. The -n 100 will run 100 pings to the specific site and will give you a basic idea of any packetloss you might be getting to that site.

2. The basics - clear your cookies, temp files, internet cache (for Firefox).

3. Check disk fragmentation and run spy-ware/AV scans.

4. Are you running wired or wireless? Is Windows set up to disable the card when it thinks it is not needed? To check this, right click the "My Computer" icon, choose properties, click the "Hardware" tab, choose Device Manager. In Device Manager, right click your individual network adapter, choose properties, then click the "Power Management" tab. Make sure the checkbox under "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" is unchecked. Click "ok" and close the device mangler out.

5. Do you run a firewall? Or run a router? If so, make sure you have the specific ports open in either or both for the game. You can get the info for how do to that here.

6. Check with your ISP and see if they are blocking any specific ports. Some, like Charter, have done that in the past and that can cause issues.

7. When you start the game, right click whatever is running in your system tray and either disable it or exit it. Norton and other AV/firewalls are notorious for borking game connectivity. Alternatively, you can also set up a script to kill running processes then another script to start them back up. If you need, I can post the ones that I use for this kind of thing. They help me, might help you.

8. As others have suggested, delete your WTF and add-ons folders and run the game "vanilla" to see if the issue continues.

There are a few other things but this is the stuff I tend to check first with specific connection issues like this.

Edited, Apr 23rd 2008 9:23am by Wordaen

n/m, talking to myself...

Edited, Apr 23rd 2008 3:47pm by CrimsonKingg

Are you getting any error messages when you are d/c'ed? I was d/c'ing a lot on my old PC. I was getting a lot of #132 errors.

In the end I think it was a combination of of my old PC giving up the ghost and the requirements to run WOW adequately changing as the game was updated.

I ended up buying a new PC and in the three months since that I have been playing again, I would be unlucky to have had more than one d/c a month.

LOL it's a shared house yes, but I share it with my parents and sisters. And while I'm certain at least a few of them are DLing ****, it's most likely not what is affecting me.

Tomorrow after work I am just going to completely uninstall WoW and start from scratch. If that doesn't work then, well....I'll just be screwed into 2-4 hours worth of reinstallation + UI setup. And at least then I'll be pretty sure it's a hardware issue. Not 100% sure, but it'll certainly narrow it down.

If it was me having connection issues, and the other computers in the house were not having a problem, I'd stick in a different brand network card and try it. Perhaps you could borrow one from family or friend as a test.

I'd check your network card. If it's on board, drop in a pci network card and see if the problems continue.

I get this problem with Comcast when I connect through our router. Apparently Comcast boots people offline for brief periods (~2 secs) when you use a router. The solution was to clone my PC's IP and MAC address with my router (so the cable modem thought it was dealing directly with my PC instead of the intervening router.) Don't have time to write out the full instructions right now (and don't remember them 100% off the top of my head) but it solved my problem (at least until the next time the cable modem gets disconnected for whatever reason)

Also, the thread title reminded me of one of the more humorous quotes (warning: harsh language) from bash.org.

QOS RSVP is off by default in all versions of windows xp. It does not come installed with vista or xp x64 either.

Most of the reson P2P programs will slow a network is because they have dozens of inbound and outbound connections at once that are constantly changing. Besides limiting these connections to a point where downloading slows to a crawl or shutting the p2p program off completely it will be a huge hit to your network.

The best way to get around roomates and such with p2p programs running would be to buy a gaming router like what D-link makes, Dlink has a gaming router with a sort of modified QOS called gaming mode and what id does is prioritizes gaming packets over all else.