Latency issues

Hello there. I'm in some need of some help with some new latency issues I've been having. Here's my hardware details:


Mother board : Gigabyte something (installer disc say 6 quad/ S series)
Processor: Intel E4500
RAM: 3328MB
VGA: Asus nVidia GeForce 8600 GT
OS: Windows 7 Pro 32bit (6.1, Build 7600)

If you need more details than that just ask and I'll get the answers for you.

The Problem:

I decided I wanted to try out Windows 7 Pro OS as I was Previously on XP Pro. I backed up all my wanted files and Deleted the XP partition and installed the new OS. Everything went sweet and so far I'm quite happy with Win7. I had to reinstall all my games however and my favourite is Battlefield Bad Company 2. I know my system isn't all that crash hot but it plays real smooth when the graphics are set at Low but gets choppy at anything above medium.

I had an issue with the installer when it came to installing the PunkBuster client. Since the game had already been installed I manually stopped the PB install and amended it manually although I have found that I have to remind PnkBstrB services to run every now and then.

So the game works fine, the hardware does the job but I'm having huge Latency issues while playing in Multiplayer. My Ping sits around 230 mark as a minimum but usually around the 250-270 and often spikes near 400 for oceanic servers and for servers I know are local such as Games.on.net which is run by my ISP Internode.

I have tried port forwarding for all ports supplied by EA. I have double checked my firewall settings and have given it as much access as I can offer. Doing these 2 things brought the average down from 320ms to 240ms but that is still too high for smooth game play.

My brother has his PC plugged into the same modem router (DLink g604t) and has none of these issues running the same OS however has a more powerful system than myself. His ping sits around the 120-150 area consistently.

The last thing I'd like t point out is that when I installed the new OS I did not install any of the Drivers from the installer discs I got with the hardware, rather just let Windows select appropriate drivers for it all. However, I have updated the graphics driver from the nVidia website.

So, I suppose installing the correct drivers would be better than running on the generic ones but could it be the Win7 operating system mixed with my dated hardware slowing things down? I never once had Latency issues while running XP.

Thanks in Advance

ero

 

SOLVED.

Thanks to anyone who thought they could help. I figured it out myself in the end. It was as simple as updating the LAN driver. Well, I've learned not to trust Microsoft's generic drivers to do the same job as the OEM drivers.

Thanks again.

ero