crashing,locking up, and general connection problems.

[Grizzled]

The multitude of posts need cleaned up. what i am about to post here needs to be a sticky. I like other people have been dealing with zone lock ups, ui error packet loss, etc.
What is posted below is not a fix. It is a way to trouble shoot. After 5 months of trying the same trivial shit over and over again, I called my isp. They believe my dish is out of alignment. this may fix my issues for me and maybe not you. but thats ok because we are trouble shooting. Here is what i did to come to the conclusion of an ISP issue.

the first thing you do is open the command prompt. win7 and below should be Start button>accessories>command prompt.
In the command prompt type in "cd.." without the quotes. you may have to do this multiple times to get the prompt back to "c:\>" with out quotes.

Next you will type in ping (your router IP). Linksys default will look like this (your brand of router will have a different ip). ping 192.168.1.1
This will display the latency between your comp and the router. should be 0ms if its not you may have an issue.

Next step is to plug directly into your modem, and remove the router. If windows does not automatically reset the disable and reenable your lan device.
Now you can right click the lan icon in your windows tray and open it for its properties or network and sharing center. Once network and sharing center is open you will see "Local area connection" highlighted blue. click on this. then click the details button. It will show some ip addresses. Please for the love of god do not ever post these on a forum.
what you are looking for here is the default gateway that is your modem. write that number down and punch it into the command prompt just like the router ping you just did. so ping (insert default gateway ip here.) repeat this for the dns server or servers as well. Be sure for each one of these you record the delay. It will be written like this example- 77ms. there will be a mix a max and an average. the average should suffice.

My example came out to 0ms to router-0ms to modem-670ms to both dns addresses.

Last but not least instead of a string of numbers for an address we can also ping a website.
soo... ping www.google.com
google should a an abundance of bandwidth so they are a good test bed.

My google test came out to 650ms

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER:
Now that we have our pings, what does it all mean. the 0ms from my examples for the modem and router are as they should be. Now the 600 to 700ms ping to my isp's servers or googles server this is the sketchy part. thats pretty much like being routed through england and back, this is no good. this is the detective work I used to try and figure out what is going on. My isp is confident its a hardware issue on their end. You may not have a satellite connection, but modems do go bad(been there done that). Dirty power also can make a modem go wonkers(been there done that too).

disclaimer: I am not an It professional. But in building my own rigs and keeping a network for the last 16 years you pick things up. If someone wants to make this a sticky with pictures and all that feel free to do so. Honestly it most likely needs to be.