Packet loss

So the last few days after I had to do a system recovery on my laptop and installed all the latest drivers my internet connection has been getting very bad.
It takes a long while to load any pages. So I ran pingtest to see what the problem is and as it turns out I am losing around on average between 6%-8% of the packets coming in. (sometimes as high as 15%)
The router that we are using is a few years old, it is a linksys wrt54g router.
Is there something that I can do that fix this problem?

 

For starters link directly to the modem and see if you still get packet loss... usually packet loss is the ISP's fault (overloaded nodes). If you aren't getting any loss with a direct link to the modem then yeah your router or computer could be the culprit.

Chances are you'll have to contact your isp and complain. If you don't want to go that far or hate phones, look for people in your area using your isp on ISP discussion forums | DSLReports.com, ISP Information . Chances are pretty good that if there is that much packet loss in the area someone else has noticed too.

 

Sorry it took so long to reply back, been busy.
But yeah after looking around those forums I haven't been the only one having troubles it seems. (I can't view the topics in the Comcast direct sectionthough.)
Funny thing is usually during the day now its fine but sometime I am guessing around 8PM or later it starts to get really bad.

 

ISPs, especially Comcast, will drop a certain amount of ICMP traffic, so ping is not an effective measure of actual packet loss.

Comcast has been having very very bad DNS server problems in the past weeks. Try switching to an alternate DNS server like OpenDNS or Google's DNS.

 

Are you using wireless or wired?

If your using wireless try changing the channel. Use inSSIDer to find the least congested channel.