Hi everyone!
I am new to all of this forum so any help you can offer me is greatly appreciated. My connection has been working fine until as of late; it is really slow, my ping and ms in games fluctuate from 300-1500, and is generally sluggish during page loading.  I have not had any recent hardware changes or software installs.  I called my ISP and they had me do speed tests, and a technician is coming in the next week.  I am on a Netgear RP-614v2 router, with the latest firmware. I've checked netstat in prompt for connections and I've tried plugging my own computer straight in from the cable modem/ no router, but I still receive around the same results with download/upload tests. 

OS
Windows XP SP2

ISP
Shaw Cable 5Mbps/ 512Kbps

Tweak Tester II Results
http://www.dslreports.com/tweakr/block:575d92f?service=cable&speed=5000&os=winXP&via=normal

testmy.net DL Speed Test Results
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::.. Download Stats ..:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Download Connection is:: 421 Kbps about 0.4 Mbps (tested with 1496 kB)
Download Speed is:: 51 kB/s
Tested From:: http://testmy.net/ (Server 1)
Test Time:: 2007/04/07 - 5:47pm
Bottom Line:: 7X faster than 56K 1MB Download in 20.08 sec
Tested from a 1496 kB file and took 29.125 seconds to complete
Download Diagnosis:: May need help : running at only 11.27 % of your hosts average (shawcable.net)
D-Validation Link:: http://testmy.net/stats/id-Q9TDRJWSA
User Agent:: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3

Tracert and Ping Program Results
Pinging testmy.net [67.18.179.85] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 67.18.179.85: bytes=32 time=447ms TTL=48
Reply from 67.18.179.85: bytes=32 time=248ms TTL=48
Reply from 67.18.179.85: bytes=32 time=224ms TTL=48
Reply from 67.18.179.85: bytes=32 time=425ms TTL=48

Ping statistics for 67.18.179.85:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),

Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 224ms, Maximum = 447ms, Average = 336ms

------------------------------------------
Tracing route to testmy.net [67.18.179.85]

over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.0.1
  2     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  3    46 ms   350 ms    17 ms  rd1bb-ge5-0-0-8.vc.shawcable.net [64.59.158.194]
  4   123 ms   194 ms    51 ms  rc1bb-ge5-0-0.vc.shawcable.net [66.163.69.105]
  5   103 ms   198 ms    25 ms  rc2wt-pos1-0.wa.shawcable.net [66.163.76.142]
  6   207 ms   495 ms    60 ms  rx0wt-abovenet.wa.shawcable.net [66.163.68.22]
  7   482 ms   156 ms   139 ms  so-2-1-0.mpr2.sjc2.us.above.net [64.125.28.21]
  8   610 ms  1323 ms   285 ms  so-3-2-0.cr1.dfw2.us.above.net [64.125.29.54]
  9   183 ms   316 ms   201 ms  64.124.79.77.theplanet.com [64.124.79.77]
 10   405 ms   102 ms   890 ms  te9-1.dsr01.dllstx3.theplanet.com [70.87.253.6]
 11   203 ms   267 ms   218 ms  vl41.dsr01.dllstx4.theplanet.com [70.85.127.83]
 12    83 ms     *      160 ms  gi1-0-2.car17.dllstx4.theplanet.com [67.18.116.85]
 13   150 ms   159 ms   287 ms  55.b3.1243.static.theplanet.com [67.18.179.85]

Trace complete.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Hey thanks for the reply tommie; my mistake for not noting that earlier in my original post - I run regular virus scans, spyware tools, and registry cleaners, and I also defrag at least once a month.  Neither of these has helped my situation thus far.