My ping is gradually increasing. I have America's Army and Starcraft installed. But that's it. I seem to be pretty much free from adwareware, viruses, blah blah blah, etc... I haven't really even saved much of anything to my computer, yet it seems to be processing slower. And along with this my cable modem frequently loses signal completely for random periods of time without cause. I could be standing there not even at the computer and watch the modem lose everything but power and pc activity. I am directly connected to the modem currently no other computers are running off of it. But my main question is what can I do to optomize my performance when it is up and running. Would lowering my packet size help as it does for dial-up internet connection and if so how do I change it and change it to what? Any advice
at all I would greatly appreciate!

You shouldn't need to change packet size. Are you running a firewall? You should be.

If your ping times and what not are increasing, and you know there's an issue with your ISP, that's where to start.

"Milk was a bad choice!"

Hmmm, I have no idea what your problem is, goto http://www.dslreports.com/ run some tests and post their with your findings the will help you out quick.

Hi
re:ping creep & online games.

if above posts dont yeild anything , then look for denial of service attacks, and if possible spec other players who appear to be doing remarkably well for what little 'skillz' they may have, hint.
the spoilers are out there.

cheaters aside do other players with excessive bandwidth cause similar problems, as ive seen the usual players on 1to 2 meg cable being trounced by 8-10 meggers,no one seems to have an answer for that in the games community may be down to how the server is run , titan, jolt etc
can any one else cast light on this?

"ive seen the usual players on 1to 2 meg cable being trounced by 8-10 meggers,no one seems to have an answer for that in the games community may be down to how the server is run , titan, jolt etc
can any one else cast light on this? "

This all has to do with the netcode of the application, plus server and client configs.

I remember with the original Counterstrike, you could manipulate variables on your machine that effected bandwidth consumption, and to a degree could influence which packets took precendence over others from other client machines.

Also, games use a protocol called UDP as opposed to TCP, which is connectionless, and does not try to resequence packets to reconstruct the stream of data. What that means is if packets come in out of order, there is no process to resolve it. For example, you and someone else see each other, and you fire first, but even though he fires second, if the packets that contain that info arrive before yours do to the server, your packets are probably dropped.

"Milk was a bad choice!"