Question Connected to the internet but browser is suffering from slow or failed connections

Nov 11, 2022
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Hello all,

This issue began for me about 3 weeks back. To be fair, I had no issues prior and have had no luck thus far in correctly identifying the problem. One night while watching a friend stream through discord my internet randomly went out. Not super surprising really. Within 20 or so minutes it was back up and running after I did a router reset. From that moment onward however, I have noticed significant issues when browsing the internet. Specifically, only browsing. As a gamer, good examples would be I can play for hours on end Apex Legends or World of Warcraft without issues or disconnecting, even now. On the contrary, I can barely load a single 2 minute long youtube video without having to wait an unreasonably long amount of time for it to properly load. If you were to be sitting at my desk, loading up said 2 minute long video, you'd likely have to wait approx. 2-4 minutes just for it to load enough of the video so you could play it without interruption. Forget a video that might be 10-20 minutes or longer. This issue, by the way, occurs on all 3 of the major browsers (edge, firefox and chrome).

My computer specs are mid-tier (self-build about 2 years ago) but I don't think this is a hardware issue. At least not one that would happen so randomly. I have high-speed internet (fios to be exact). In terms of what I have done so far, I of course, fully reset my router and home internet connection. I have cleared caches of all afore mentioned browsers. I have flushed the dns. I have uninstalled and reinstalled the 3 of them separately. I have updated all the necessary drivers that I can tell. I have checked for exceptions in firewalls and also turned them off to check for differences in connectivity. No luck thus far.

I am somewhat at a loss as to what to do. I know the exact date and rough time at which this issue occurred, and have even gone back into my system files to see if there were any files and/or programs downloaded/installed at or around that day/time. I have seen 2, but have no idea if that is coincidence and/or if they are necessary to normal windows functionality. I don't really want to go uninstalling something important and then brick windows. This by the way is exclusively a "my computer" problem. Other devices using the home network do not suffer from the same browsing issue. I suspect the culprit is something software, update, driver related... but I am not smart enough to discern or discover this or state it as fact.

So now I turn to you much smarter people. I would appreciate any and all help that you can give me.

Thank you!