Sudden Internet Slowdowns and Possible Culprit

[Orthodoctus]

For the past week, I've had random internet slowdowns where most websites loaded slowly, the ping was high, YT videos not loading at all, and Facebook/Instagram pictures not loading. I applied some of the popular fixes for network issues (netsh commands etc) and nothing worked except resetting IPs or disabling then re-enabling the adapter.

 

While I was testing my speed with Speedtest.net it showed me that I'm in the US (I'm not). I was really confused then I had an idea as to what's going on. I checked my IP address with whatismyipaddress.com and it also showed me that I'm in the US. I uninstalled Hotspot Shield but my YT videos were still buffering, then I uninstalled Windscribe and they worked instantly. I should've checked before uninstalling it to see if the program was running or not (I'm fairly certain its icon wasn't showing in the notification area).

 

So yeah, I thought I should share this in case someone is having a similar issue because I was about to buy a NIC.

[Windows7ge]

So Windscribe is a free VPN & Ad blocker (according to Google). That would explain why your IP said you were in a different country. As to the exact cause of your errors would require more investigation but it sounds like due to the VPN your system was making requests to these remote servers and wasn't getting replies fast enough or at all.

[Orthodoctus]

Yeah, Windscribe was terrible most of the time when I used it, which explains why my connection was so bad. What's bugging me though is that I didn't set it to start with Windows and there was no sign of it in the notification area. Not sure why or how it was running in the background and connecting after a few hours of using the computer.