[Jowy]

First off, I wasn't sure whether this belongs in this forum or the gaming forum since it deals with me running Windows on my Intel Mac. If this is the wrong place, feel free to move the thread.

On to my question, I've been noticing very high ping spikes in World of Warcraft and Guild Wars, two games I have tried to play online under Windows on my Intel Mac. This has me puzzled because I am using a cable connection, and under OS X, my pings under WoW in particular are always lower than what I'm seeing on Windows. Under Windows they're almost always 30-50% higher, and jump up and down a lot, but never go anywhere near the consistency I see under OS X.

I have a similar thing happening in Guild Wars. I'll log in, everything will seem to be fine, however even just moving around in outpost areas, my ping will jump up to 900-1k, and then back down to the 200-300 range (which already seems high considering I'm, once again, on a cable connection) and this is noticeable on screen in terms of the latency delay.

I've checked my running processes, and upon researching the ones I don't recognize, I haven't found anything that would be a background bandwith hog yet. So I figured I'd ask here if there's anything else I could look into because at this point I'm out of ideas since I can't find any other reports of this sort of thing occurring to anyone else.

For reference information my hardware specs are Intel iMac Core Duo 2ghz 2GB RAM. Noteworthy processes I have running under Windows are: Avast Anti Virus, and NetScreen Remote which is VPN software for connecting into my company's firewall however it is always by default not connected.

[ghporter]

Are you running Windows through Parallels or Boot Camp? Your post doesn't say. Ping lags under Parallels should be expected because there's more software between the hardware and the Windows app.

[Jowy]

I apologize, I am running through Boot Camp. Parallels has never been installed on my machine either, just in case previous installs of it might cause conflicts with Boot Camp, though I doubt that would be the case.

[ghporter]

In XP as soon as it's finished booting, click on Start then Run. Type "msconfig" in the box and click "OK". Now click on the "Startup" tab and see what is being run at startup. It'll be a bunch, I'll bet. One (or more) of those processes is probably doing something with your network connection. Which one depends on your particular installation, but ANYTHING that can use the Internet is a possible bandwidth hog.

There are also a number of tweaks you can implement in Windows that will help you smooth out performance. Check out Broadband Reports' Tweak Test for starters. Great stuff there.

[Jowy]

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll take another look at my startup items again, though I've looked at them once, and didn't see too much out of the ordinary.

I'll definitely see if anything at that link helps any as well. Thanks again for the advice! I'll report back as soon as I can.

[Jowy]

I think I figured out what might have been causing the problem as after I disabled Netscreen Remote from starting at startup, Guild Wars stopped having ping spams, and hovered in the green/orange area as I would expect for a free online game. WoW is a different story though. It's ping was still well above what I usually get in OSX. I'm not sure if this is due to their Warden program, the beta nature of Boot Camp's drivers or what, but right now I'm figuring I'll just keep on playing it in OSX until I have an absolute need of using it in Windows (i.e. a guild which refuses to change their Vent/TS codec). Thanks again for the tips ghporter