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#1
Internet connectivity drops; No change in taskbar icon
Hello,
I'm using Win 7 64 bit. Recently, over the past week or so, I've noticed that the internet connectivity will drop after a little while. It can be 5m or perhaps an hour. After this, a reboot is required to reconnect. The strange part about this, is that the icon in the corner that tells you your network connectivity status stays at 5 bars rather than the familiar 5 bars with a caution sign as if there isn't an issue.
Some tests I've tried after this happened before a reboot:
1. ping google.com in cmd
RESULT: Strangely, I receive ping packets back from google, which may explain why the status in the corner stays the same.
2. telnet to google.com on port 80 and send a request.
RESULT: telnet acts strangely. Characters appear black on black and thus are unreadable. I was unable to send an HTTP request to google, and thus the result is inconclusive.
3. Check facebook notifications in chome
RESULT: Oddly enough, I can receive notifications, but I cannot reply, nor click on a new link to open the notification.
After the connection "drops", you will not be able to use chrome, nor firefox to access the internet. Both browsers will send requests that never return packets from the host. One guess I have is that the connectivity does not drop completely, but drops to a pace that is so slow, little information can be loaded.
My initial response to this was: "I have a virus". I downloaded AVG, ran a scan, it found a few viruses, removed them from the computer, rebooted, did another scan and it came up clean. The problem still persists. What disturbs me is that one of the viruses found on my computer ended up to be a "patching virus", a virus that will bind itself to other executables and windows .dll files, slowly taking down the target computer. If this network problem can be attributed to this virus that has been removed, then what should my next action be?
Assuming the virus is not the issue, what should my next course of action be? What are some good network monitoring tools that can monitor speed, and packets sent and received? I would like to get rid of this problem as it's an irritating hindrance to my work.
Thanks,
Dragos