I experienced a mysterious connection trouble on my Windows 7 laptop in the last two days. The symptom is a very slow and unstable connection. Since I had encountered similar problems on other computers before, I assumed it is a spyware infection. This specific machine has the Microsoft Essentials anti-virus that I am not trusting much. However, the frustration continues as I just can not connect to internet or home network and download anything large. At the end, I resorted to downloading to another home computer and used wired connection on this machine to get the file running. It took some effort (probably because I had WiFi and Wire on at the same time) but finally finished.
After I run Spybot S&D: Surprise! I have zero problems!
Not even a tracking cookie? At this point, I started wondering if my previous assumption was all wrong. I tried "ping -t" to my local router and found the connection is not stable at all, at it drops the ping every once a while. Then I suddenly realized, upon looking at the connection properties, that I changed some settings on the wireless card for my new Wireless-N network. And surely, it turns out that the "Throughput Enhancement" in Advanced was turned to "Enabled". After I set it back to "Disabled", the connection is back to normal.
This is a lesson that I have unlearned multiple times. And I am sure I will unlearn it again in the future: Always jog down the changes that you are making, especially if you don't know what it really means...
