Need some help before I call my ISP

I am getting pretty angry at my ISP. Hopefully someone on here will have a good sugestion before I change my ISP. lol

About a month back my internet worked fine. I was able to play games online, download torrents, and use my chatting programs. Then one day all these programs stoped working for me. I thought it was just my laptop but our desktop was having the same problems.

So after reformating my laptop and reseting my router I was able to use AIM and MSN again. However online games do not work and I can't connect to any torrents. I have pretty much tried all the torrent programs and I tried different torrents.

I figured I would just need to forward the ports. But that doesn't help. My IP is static so I could download torrents and forward my ports but I still don't have any luck.

Does anyone have any ideas before I call my ISP. I would change ISPs right now but I don't think my dad will want to change.
Thanks,
Tim

 

Assuming you've port-forwarded correctly, is your laptop running some kind of software firewall (ie Windows firewall, Norton Internet Security, Zone Alarm, etc)?

 

Some ISP's monitor bandwidth and in some cases if you are downloading more than "your fair share" they can and will block certain downloads.

Since you mentioned that you were downloading torrents that could be the issue. Changing ISP's may not help, since in the in the end they all monitor IP traffic and eventually the same situation will happen again.

 

Well I do have firewalls now. But I turned them off and still had this problem. I even made sure that the firewall was turned off in the router.

The only reason why it seems weird is because one day I could play games and download torrents. And then the next I couldn't. Stupid ISPs.
Tim

 

Hope I can help. So, first things first:

have you tried to bypass your router?
have you tried to powercycle (reboot) both your modem and your router?
have you tried to run a continuous ping and a traceroute ("tracert" from command prompt) to, say, www.yahoo.com
to check for latency and packet loss?

Please try these in the above order and if you can post a traceroute (or PM).

 

I have a modem/router. It has wireless too.

How would I bypass my router?
I did reboot the router.
And how in the heck do I run a continuous ping and traceroute. =P
Thanks for the help,
Tim

 

For a continuous ping, from the command prompt type:

ping www.google.com -t

There's no continuous traceroute. From the command prompt just type:

tracert www.google.com

You can also use pathping to locate spots that have network latency and network loss.

For specific help on a dos command, type the command followed by /?

pathping /?

You can plug your laptop/desktop directly into the modem. If you do that, your ISP will need the MAC address of the machine. Regarding your router reboot, did you do a hard reset?

 

Yeah I did a hard reset. Both my ping and my tracert went through okay (thanks for the help Leshii ) So that is kinda strange.

And yeah I did a hard reset of the router. I probably just need to give the ISP a call. If you guys have any more suggestions let me know.
Tim