I recently moved off to college and am having some issues with the internet here. At home, we have had cable for as long as I can remember, and it rocked. We get about 2.5 Mbps on average. When I first hooked my computer up here I was getting about the equivilent of a 56k modem. I called the tech guys and they came and pinged the crap out of every site on the internet for some reason and called a tech from the ISP. He came over and replaced a worn wall jack (which fixed the packet dropping) and replaced the router (why??? don't know), but he was still suprised that he couldn't get my speed results very high. I currently average about 400-800 Kbps depending on the time of day. The way our school internet is set up is weird, each room has its own cable router. I know that like 20,000 people are sharing this connection, but I am thinking that is a bit slow, it is extremely noticable compared to my home connection. I guess I am just wondering what other people in college are getting, and if I should keep bothering the tech guys (they don't seem to care anymore because at least I have some internet.)

I did find that adjusting the rwin value helped alot!!  I was on cable internet 4200/256 then came here to Purdue and I was in the low 3's for download.  I ran the program Van Buren recommended to you and now I am 12000/2300 i think... i dont remember.. I am on wireless right now so that will not give me a good test but when i get back to the dorm i will post speeds... Run the program and that should help... For the most part the IT staff at college has been excellent!!! Hell of a lot better than my ISP at home, Comast.   I was being attacked by some trojan by some dude who had a dirty computer...  They took care of that problem really quick.. ofcourse I provided them with the IP address of the computer..

By the way welcome to the forum!! keep posting and you will learn more about the internet/computers than you ever wanted to know.

Hmm, having a little trouble. I was following the instructions for the CableNuts program and I ran into a snag. My MTU setting is 1420, thus my MSS setting is 1380, which is not even on the list of optimized configurations. I tried searching the internet, and I even found instructions from microsoft about how to change the MTU value, but none of them worked. I can't get it to change from 1420. I have Windows XP Pro by the way. Does anyone know the best way to change the MTU setting?

so it doesn't matter about the MTU? Does the cablenuts program change that? I think that there must be something wrong with the cable right now because I am getting some very strange activity. Pages will just randomly stop loading sometimes and I have to refresh them, its also running extremely slow, worse than usual. I tried the cablenuts program and it didn't seem to make a difference than the default settings.

As a side note, what is an acceptable packet loss rate for a router?

Thanks for all your help.

weird... when I tried to tweak the settings in the cablenuts program it started causing me to drop packets between me and the router. It was dropping about 15~20% up from 1-2% normally. The packet dropping, I assume, then hindered my speed on the tests. I am going to field a guess that it is not my settings that are the major problem here, but some piece of equipment between me and the internet somewhere or maybe the ISP's configuration. I am gonna give them a call and ask them to check it out. The last time they were here though they just fooled with settings and crap on my computer so fast I couldn't tell what they were doing and it was making me nervous   , so I am a little hesitant to have them come back. Thanks for all your help!