Inconsistent networking problems, unrelated to network or network card

Hi folks,

This forum has been extremely helpful for me in the past, so I'm testing your awesomeness once again.

I've had an unusual networking problem for about a year and a half. When browsing the web, certain requests will just never complete, on any browser. Downloads are often interrupted (anything larger than 10MB is nearly impossible). Even large transfers between this machine and others on my local network will fail. SCP connections will sometimes abort in the middle of a transfer.

It's quite inconsistent. I don't have this problem for any particular resource, and the failure point is different every time. If a particular page isn't rendering, I can often go to my.yahoo.com (which for some reason always seems to work) and hit the back arrow, and then the request will often complete normally.

Google is a little unique: when I encounter this problem on Google, I have to wait for the original requests to be aborted (after about 26 seconds) before any further requests to Google will succeed.

I can't say exactly when it started, but it was reasonably close to the time I updated a driver for my network adapter, as instructed.

At the time, I was on a wired network, using a Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller adapter, connecting through the wired port of an old Netgear router (sorry, I don't have the model number) to cable broadband (with NuVisions).

Since then, I have changed just about everything except my motherboard. I've disabled my old network adapter, though it's still connected. I'm on a wireless network, using a Netgear WNDA4100 N900 Wireless Dual Band USB Adapter, connecting through a Linksys E4200 to Verizon FIOS.

Unfortunately, nothing about my problem has changed. I fear a motherboard issue, but I don't know how to find out. Can you please help?

Sorry, I didn't complete the checklist!

I have no anti-virus, security or firewall software. I've run numerous scans since the problem began, and they've always been clean.

Attached is the output from ipconfig /all.

Ok starting back to the time when you installed the extra 8GB of memory and the blue screen events that followed.

You do realize that installing this extra memory can be problematic depending on many factors.

If the memory isn't matching the old memory precisely then you will for certain have problems such as you are describing here.

I say this because Windows has no such inherent problems as you are seeing.

The latency and voltage settings come into play and there is more to installing memory then just plugging it into the board. So if that memory isn't the same with matching specs like voltage and latency numbers then this is likely to be the cause of all problems.

Hi, thanks for looking into it.

For what it's worth, I have no other symptoms that would indicate a RAM problem. The machine runs smoothly, never crashes, and anything that doesn't involve transfer of data over the network appears to be okay. I would expect some other kind of problems if it were a RAM incompatibility. I mean, downloading a file isn't very RAM intensive, yet that's what is failing. Things that use tons of RAM, like Photoshop or games, are working fine.

Thanks to your advice, I took a look and found that the voltages are different and the timings are also slightly different. All four modules are DDR3 1333 SDRAM. However, the two original OCZ-OCZ3G1333LV2G modules are 9-9-9-20 @ 1.65v, and the two newer CMX8GX3M2A1333C9 modules are 9-9-9-24 @ 1.50v.

I'm attaching the relevant output from CPU-Z regarding my RAM.

I started up the machine with each pair of RAM modules individually, and the problem persisted. Oddly, my internet was noticeably faster with just the OCZ modules, but there was no change in the original issue. Also, the older modules appear to run at 1.50v despite being listed at 1.65v. This doesn't seem to be something I can change in my BIOS. I also tried different configurations of the modules, as I wasn't sure which slots constituted a "pair" (slots 1 and 3, and slots 2 and 4 look like pairs on the board), to no avail.

Any suggestions?

Believe it or not there is a long list of problems caused by incompatible memory, mixing different memory sticks or memory that isn't set up correctly. When you say it never crashes, why was your link to the BSOD posted in the first place? I'm sure you believe it was a driver problem but it wasn't.

OCZ is the absolute worst memory on earth. The entire company went belly up awhile back. The problems with this memory go back to the core 2 duo days. No, I'm not making this up.

The voltage being off is a problem as well and you can do this through bios if you switch the memory controller over to manual rather than automatic which should allow you to manually set up your memory parameters. Still you simply can't mix these two different memory's and expect anything to work correctly.

This is the reason when you build a new machine using a particular motherboard the first thing you do is research which memory's are compatible with that particular board as many boards are picky about the memory they will work with.

The type of problems you are reporting here are not something that Windows typically has problems with, seriously crashing in the middle of a download with basically a new board? Board stability is the problem in this case. That doesn't necessarily mean the system crashes or BSOD's.

You need to stick with one or the other, not both, I would ditch the OCZ in either case. If the first one can't be made stable then try another vendor like GSkill or Patriot, better yet, look up the reviews on your board at Newegg, people will report which memory works best, use that memory.

Just remember that even if you get the settings correct or find a compatible vendor, it may not fix the problem you are seeing until you either run a system file scan or reinstall the OP system. This is true because with memory problems you are writing corrupted memory cycles to the harddrive which will corrupt it as well.

Anyone else feel free to point the Op to the magic fix everything button... I still haven't found that button because it doesn't exist.