slow internet

Hi all, just a question. Hopefully you guys can help me get my internet a little faster. Last week my son resetted the our router because he said his internet was not working correctly. Mine was fine, after he did that we could not get internet, i called my buddy and he fixed our linksys WRT54G wireless router. Now we have internet. He fixed it on December 30th, everything was fine and the internet was very fast for both computers. We wake up this morning to a slow internet. We always use CCleaner and registry cleaners, i do not think that is a problem. My son does i believe use P2P clients such as bitlord. He said he didnt download a virus and always checks everything. On both computers we ran spyware and AVG PRO tests, no threats. I am wondering what could be making our internet slow. we do use firefox and fasterfox. I know its the internet, i called and they just said to unplug everything down then boot it back up, but if i do that will that reset the router again? so then we wont have internet or will it automatically come up? The guy that fixed our internet is out of town so this is why i am asking you guys, I dont really trust verizon. Also, our packet sizes are low, on my sons computer, SENT-RECEIVED, used to be in the 900,000's, now its 6,000-3,000. same with the main computer, SENT USED TO BE millions, now its 215,000 compared to the received being 1,214,000. Dont know if that helps..any thoughts will help me big time..sorry for the long post!

Both computers are Dell, running windows XP PRO, SP2

 

another thing i forgot to mention..I DO have internet still, when I go into firefox or internet explorer it loads the main page, but then i type a website and it takes forever or does not load at all and says operation timed out.

 

Yes, reboot the network, modem > router > computers in that order only. Give each plenty of time to reboot with all lights up because each depends on the other in that order. (except the computers - any order and both at the same time after the router is up.)

Settings your friend made will stay.

Are either of the machines slow too, or are they as fast as normal and only the internet slow? (looking for malware.)

Close all programs that you have opened including email, IE and Firefox. Go ctrl+alt+del and click the performance tab on each machine. Under the Services tab, you'll see 2 columns on the right. One is cpu and the other is like Mem usage. Scroll down. Is anything hogging cpu or memory? At the bottom is a system idle processes item which should be very high number. That's what's "left over." Should be almost 100, like 96-98%.

Now click the Performance tab. Your cpu should be near an idle and the yellow line for the paging graph should be laying flat on the bottom.

Now click the network tab. Network usage should be zero.

Post back. What did you find? Remember to answer whether either machine is itself really slow.