poor latency

[Davidmint]

I installed wow back on my new computer in january. I have a dell inspiron 531, with 8400 128mb nividia card. 64amd windows vista, 250g harddrive and 3g of memory. almost everytime I log into wow, my latency starts out good, but then sometimes it goes to 4000+ and up to 15 000. I then have to log out, but I can't log back in unless my computer is completely shut off for about 15 minutes. Then i go back into the game and its still slow. I m on a wireless, but I hardwired my comp to the modem and I still have the same problems. My internet is good on wireless. just the game isn't. I have allowed the loopholes for the game to get thru the router, and I have turned off my firewall and I'm still getting this bad latency. Can anyone help me figure this out. I think its windows vista, cause I never had a problem with xp, but I can't put xp on this computer unfortunately.

[Kalos]

It's either going to be the OS, Vista is a common issue these days, or it could be the network card (with is controlled by Vista and Vista-compatible drivers). Why couldn't you erase the OS and install a new one (E.G. Upgrade to XP)?

[Davidmint]

well, I can upgrade to XP, I would just loose parts of my technical support from dell. Also im not too sure if I upgrade to XP if the problem would go away. do you think it would? What do you think I could try first with vista? what would I do to the network card?

[Kalos]

I'm fairly confident that it is a possible cause. That it's definantly the cause here, can't be certain of. But lousy software with a reputation for this exact problem, that has been solved by similar moves to XP, thatcan be witnessed in the backthreads of this forum alone. If it doesn't work, you can just use your Dell provided install disk to put Vista back on; no money lost. That's why this move is often advocated.

With the network card, you can try getting a new one and installing that and its approprate drivers. Mind you, this would invalidate the warantee for certain.

[DrScience]

You can install XP on the system, but when you do that MAKE SURE you dont knock out Partition 1 or 3 on your HDD. These are your restore/utility partitions, so if anything goes wrong with the XP install, or if XP doesen't solve your problem, you can restore your system back to the Dell factory settings (Windows Vista) with these extra partitions.

Another thing you should know before installing XP on the system is that Dell does not have a full compliment of XP drivers for this system model. You would need to rely on third-party or OEM Hardware drivers which are not supported or supplied by Dell.

Kalos is actually incorrect about the warranty invalidation thing - theres almost nothing you can do to a Dell PC that would void the warranty, short of dropping it off a building or using it as a punching bag (i know it would be fun sometimes, though :P). Nothing related to software will void a Dell warranty, and if you install third-party hardware, the system can still be supported as long as you are able to revert the system back to the original hardware configuration.

Lastly, if you choose to install XP, and depending on your BIOS type, you may need to change the HDD SATA operation from AHCI to ATA - In the BIOS menu, Drill down to 'Onboard Devices', expand the menu and find the heading 'SATA Operation', change it to ATA if it is currently set to AHCI. This only needs to be done if the winXP installer CD cannot detect your HDD before installation.

[Tunga]

Install the Performance and Compatitiblity patches for Vista if you haven't already, there were a few networking bug fixes and improvements included.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938979/en-us
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938194/en-us