My laptop loses connection frequently while playing online games and downloading?

[578]

- Dell Inspiron N7110
- Comcast high-speed internet (they provide: Cisco Dpc3939 Docsis 3.0 Modem Router)

I even have problems buffering YouTube videos. Usually surfing the web is not a problem. I only encounter problems when I am, I guess, using the internet heavily.

While playing games, I lag every minute or so (my character will jump around or the game will freeze and attempt to reconnect).

If I'm downloading something, it will download fast initially and then after 30 seconds, I lose connection and you can see the speed drop to zero in the matter of 5 seconds. My laptop reconnects after about another 30 seconds.

My family never complains about internet problems on any of their devices (laptops, tablets, cell phone) and, as long as I have a fan pointed at my Xbox to stop it from overheating, I don't have a problem connecting to Xbox Live either.

I make sure that my driver's are updated using this: http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/detect?iid=dc_iduu

I'm not sure what kind of information I need to give to have someone help me, and I don't know if this is a common issue and there are simple solutions out there. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
that my *drivers are updated.

by this I mean my wireless driver has no available updates

[awefxs]

Since those are very generalized questions there is no "one size fits all" answer. A good 40-50% of my business is in this arena of performance optimization. Otherwise without more information, it is impossible to say. Start by searching Google for usage and interpretation of the Windows tracert and ping commands, and overall LAN/WAN architecture.

Please can you give us any more information? At the very least try posting the output of a relevant tracert command. For example:

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright © 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Users\YourUserName>tracert youtube.com

Tracing route to youtube.com [74.125.224.136]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 3 ms 3 ms 1 ms 192.168.0.1
2 6 ms 7 ms 7 ms xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
3 8 ms 8 ms 7 ms 192.168.xxx.xxx
4 12 ms 10 ms 10 ms 192.168.xxx.xxx
5 10 ms 11 ms 11 ms xe-11-3-0.bar1.Phoenix1.Level3.net [4.28.80.133]
6 12 ms 11 ms 11 ms ae-0-11.bar2.Phoenix1.Level3.net [4.69.148.114]
7 43 ms 42 ms 43 ms ae-4-4.ebr2.LosAngeles1.Level3.net [4.69.133.38]
8 42 ms 43 ms 43 ms ae-92-92.csw4.LosAngeles1.Level3.net [4.69.137.30]
9 44 ms 43 ms 44 ms ae-4-90.edge1.LosAngeles9.Level3.net [4.69.144.202]
10 19 ms 19 ms 19 ms 4.68.70.114
11 22 ms 20 ms 19 ms 64.233.174.238
12 20 ms 19 ms 21 ms 209.85.250.251
13 46 ms 43 ms 42 ms lax02s20-in-f8.1e100.net [74.125.224.136]

Trace complete.

Hope that helps!