Wifi downloads stall

I apologize if this has already been covered somewhere, but I haven't come across a solution to this distinct problem for several months now. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I am currently connected wirelessly to an ADSL highspeed connection, but for whatever the reason my connection would 'stall' on downloads (only with files from a single source or streaming). To ensure the files finish downloading, I found a trick where I could simply open a site in parallel and continually refresh the page, this seems to do the trick.

Now what's strange is that I can still torrent perfectly fine (no illegal stuff) and the connection will not stall at all. It seems there needs to be a steady, forced steam of data to ensure the connection.

There doesn't seem to be any fault on the router or my laptop as I've so far owned 2 sets of routers and a couple sets of laptops and the problems is persistent. Firmware is up to date. The only thing I can think of is that my ADSL provider is at fault, but that's just getting creative.


Anyone have any ideas of what's going on here? Thanks!

 

Not a setting in your browser that is cutting your connections ?

You haven't played around with router's QoS settings?, some routers allow you play with data priority

 

Thanks for the reply. Tried multiple browsers on default settings, so I doubt that would be the cause. I'll check out the QoS settings, but in all honesty I haven't really changed much on the router itself, except maybe the channel here and there.

Another observation is that the desktop that is hard wired into the router is experiencing similar problems. I'm going to try to disconnect the router and text the connection just through the modem, hopefully should rule out a few things.

 

I did have an ISP that slowed sites (to me) that I used for lots of bandwidth.
It got so bad that dialup was faster than DSL.
The day I changed to a new ISP with same speed account I got full speed surfing to all the sites that were slowed up with previous ISP (proving the theory I suspected)

ISPs do monitor where you go, especially on limitless bandwidth accounts and can control what goes on.
They should slow you up if you are bandwidth greedy but annoying interuptions if you download a file is quite unacceptable.
Your ISP may have setup a filter to check for large files, zips. exe's etc etc, as html pages are not affected, maybe test on large pdf's or different file extensions.
Maybe give them a call or just change ISP's as I did.

 

Have you tried plugging into the router? That would eliminate or confirm the wireless as a problem.

 

You need to check and turn off all of your programs that have auto-update capability. What you're describing is a download interrupt from the network accessing another server for an update status or even to download an update and install it. Even though your system should recover, it's possible you don't have enough resources (RAM) to compensate. If you've got a 32bit system, you can use a program called Memory Boost to monitor your available RAM and reclaim any not given back to the system after program shutdowns. The system never gives back the same amount of RAM that is allocated for a program. Over time, if you don't restart or reclaim it, your system will start slowing down and will use your hard drive to compensate. If it happens when you're downloading a large file or if your streaming data, it can interrupt the download cycle.

Something else you might not have considered is your Sleep/Hibernate/Display shutoff setting. If your download is longer than your Sleep/Hibernate settings, that will also interrupt it. Same goes for a display shutdown.

There's a way you can confirm these as the problem. Open up you Event Logs (Control Panel, Admin Tools, Event Viewer, Windows Logs, Application) to see what programs may have accessed the 'net at the same time you were downloading something. The System Log (below the Application log) shows any system related events, so check there for power related events.

 

Do you have more than or equal to 4gb of RAM? What bus does your Wireless card use? (PCI-e?)