slow LAN connection with laptop

[trobinett]

I'm new to this forum, but I've been searching quite a few and the responses I've read on this one seem to be the most knowledgeable.

I'm not an IT pro, just someone in my office who has to troubleshoot our networking issues. We are having a problem with one laptop connecting to the LAN.

This laptop has been fine until the past week -- all of sudden, the connection to the LAN is slow, so slow that it can't even bring in any E-mail. They just keep backing up. The laptop is a Dell Inspiron on a LinkSys router. Connecting to the Internet is no problem at all, but trying to check E-mail over the LAN connection is ridiculously slow and intermittent. It seemed to clear up on Friday, but it started again this morning. The machine is running Outlook 2003 for E-mail and Windows XP.

Any solutions?
Thanks!

[M/Q]

Welcome to the forum. Try real hard to remember if there was any new configuration or software downloaded, intended or not placed on that machine. You may want to check the event viewer for any error messages or something unusual. Also is this an Exchange based system or just Outlook SMTP client? One last quick thought is that if you have email checking AV software enabled? If so try it without and see if there is a difference. Do you have adware/spyware (AdAware or SpyBot S&D) checking programs available? If so you may want to run a scan for any of those problems.

Also, I assume this is a wireless network, if you have a chance maybe describe it in some detail as that may shed some light as well.

[trobinett]

Thanks for the reply.

The first thing I asked was if he had any viruses, but he said McAfee has been running and he hasn't gotten anything. Someone did suggest AdAware, but we haven't done that yet. It almost seems like something is taking up all of his bandwidth -- it just keeps dropping the longer he's logged in.

It is just Outlook, DSL modem, pop3 account. He is the only one having the problem. There is one other person with the same laptop with no problems. He is having another problem with his E-mail sending the same message as many as 10x if it has an attachment, which I still haven't figured out either. He is going through our DSL connection for his E-mail and Internet, not the wireless -- though he is set up on a wireless router.

The wireless router is a Dell router, but that's another problem :< that I'm working on -- to go into this right now would probably make it all more confusing {not as simple as it may sound}.

[M/Q]

I would strongly suggest running both AdAware and SpyBot. Neither one is sufficient in of itself. I was curious if you have ran the latest Windows updates that came out ? Check the performance monitor in the task manager and if his CPU time is rather high, he might be a spam forwarder or one af several other problems. Within the same task manager, also check the active process and if you determine anyone that seem unusual mention it here and we can tell if it is a required one or not. Also do you have a firewall enabled on this system?

[trobinett]

He does have a firewall. Because he has a firewall, he's hesitant to run Spybot and AdAware as he doesn't see how something could get through the firewall.

He should have the latest updates, but I'll have to check. I think the connection problem is intermittent because he and I were getting E-mails from the same person yesterday and we both got them at the same time.

When the problems starts again today I will check his task manager, event log, and AV software.

[M/Q]

That is totally not true about spyware. It comes right down the pipe on port 80 when you are surfing and at a not so nice website.

Curious as to why he is not wanting to run it. It is completely harmless unless he decides to fix or eliminate the possible problems. You can recover from those as well. That makes me suspicious of user actions, no offense intended.

[trobinett]

No offense taken. I think it's just that he has too much to do to try things that he doesn't think is the problem. We have Spybot at home and it's amazing what it catches.

I would be interested to run both while he is having the problem to see what they find.