mrenusso

Try to reproduce the issue with another machine and see if it happens. That'll help determine whether it's your machine or else.

In my experience, Electrical Engineering is the best way to go. It gives an incredible background and it proves handy when you get to "senior" jobs. It's not just PCs and networks, far from that actually, but it's damn interesting and it seems to open a lot more doors than just a BS in CompSci or Networking/Telecom.

You say you have a slow internet connection, yet you didn't tell us what your broadband speed is. It may simply be slow because you have too many devices connected to the internet at the same time and your internet speed is just used at its maximum. You would have to upgrade your LAN equipment only if you were experiencing slow speeds on your LAN. Might just be time for a plan upgrade, not a modem/router/access point upgrade. EDIT : grammar

I hate to say this, but get a cheap one. It doesn't really matter since you're unlikely to load it 100%. BUT the Cisco one's got a nice metal shell that's probably a lot more durable than the plastic ones and I know for a fact that it handles 8 full duplex Gigabit connections at 100% load (a friend got one and we tested just to make sure, haha). Is it worth the extra buck, not too sure.

YouTube is not sucking; your ISPs are. Take a look at this and replace France Telecom with your ISPs name. Peering is the biggest battle happening right now between CDNs/Tier 1 providers and ISPs. As long as YouTube refuses to pay for the [massive] network usage it's generating, ISPs will keep throttling. And no, I'll not get into the net neutrality debate, haha ! EDIT : Even though I work for an ISP, I find it outrageous that the customers have to pay the price of business decisions !

One thing. Do not use anything over 1W. Ever. Is needs to be, use repeaters, but using such powerful amps is going to interfere with anything wireless within at least a hundred feet. Seriously, don't use this.

Not so true actually. Even though all cables are certified by their categories, there are difference between getting cheap cables and more expensive ones. Namely, the longevity of the connectors, the better tip protection etc.

Since all mechanical switches are really different, you should try them all before. If you're more of a buckling spring guy, get a Unicomp, they're brilliant. Otherwise WASD keyboards are pretty good and ultra-customizable though non-backlit.

The best solution is to disable routing on the modem side and run the modem in bridge mode. In that case, your router will do all the routing and your modem will only change xDSL signal into Ethernet signal meaning you won't have to open ports on 2 different routers. Also, it should be more efficient since every device is assigned one task instead of doing everything at the same time.

You could probably do that for free using Proxmox + pfsense + Nas4Free/FreeNas. It's probably going to be a major pain in the butt to setup though but I'm pretty confident this should work as I've seen pfsense working on a Proxmox machine.

How about some price range also because prices can vary quite a lot. I know we use Zyxel stuff without hiccups at work. Best would probably be an old Alcatel Speedtouch with ADSL2+ compatibility but they're hard to come by.

Btw, you can use this version of team viewer requiring no install. Pretty handy !

Oh no problem mate ! I'm just trying to help you with this. And keep us posted, I'm curious about what it could be. Speaking of which, could this be the problem ?

This is probably better suited for the troubleshooting section, 'cause I don't think it's network related but more software [bIOS ?] related. Post there, Windows gurus are surely going to be of greater help.