Ping Spikes (router has been ruled out)

So here's what I got, I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction and I'll gladly try out any suggestions and post the results. I'm receiving random ping spikes when using my desktop PC (Windows Vista SP2 64bit). I know a common source of these problems is the router. My PC is connected wirelessly to the router, along with my brothers laptop. The laptop has no connection issues, it is only the PC.

Q#1) Would it be worth it to test a wired connection to the router? Perhaps there's an issue with my PC's wireless adapter.

I noticed the ping spikes while playing a game but I ran the following command in the command prompt:
ping -t www.khanacademy.com

I would get about 20 normal results in the 75-85ms range then one result in the 1000-1300ms range.

So there is a generalized network issue that seems to be isolated to my PC.

I have updated my video card drivers already. I uninstalled DesktopEarth. The network adapter drivers were the most current version (2009). I just installed the latest windows updates. I don't have many background processes running. I ran MemTest on my memory with no issues found.

Are there any tools available to help me debug this further or should I just continue the process of updating and testing components where I can.

Someone with a little more network knowledge might be able to point me in the right direction. I think my next steps are going to be searching for updated motherboard drivers and attempting a wired connection to the router and without the router.

I should also point out in full disclosure that there is another known issue I am having with my PC. I believe that issue is related to a failing hard drive or lose wiring on the hard drive. I believe this issue to be unrelated but someone else may think otherwise. This causes an issue where my PC basically stops responding and I need to do a hard shutdown. It would also cause issues when starting up saying there was missing system files. These errors clear up after I remount the hard drive in the case and reattach the cabling. The only link I can see here is if there is some sort of 'read loss' caused by the hard drive attributing to the lag but I doubt it.

 

Just a follow up, all drivers on my system should be up to date now. Anyone with any ideas on what I should try next?

 

by all means, try a wired connection. Sounds like an easy way to rule one more piece out.

Anti-virus and other protection/firewall software? If you have the task manager open to the performance tab, does anything spike at the time the ping spikes?