Internet speed slow on 24" C2D iMac

[Fletchzky]

Ok, this is a really strange problem.

I got my 24" (4gb RAM) iMac on January 15th, and all had been working well until Tuesday of last week. All of a sudden, web pages will stutter upon opening them and sometimes hang for 20-30 seconds before opening. It may sound trivial but when the there we no problems at all and now I have this one, it's pretty signifigant. I go to a handful of sites a day, and at any time in the day I try to visit them, one or more will "stutter" - other times they won't. There is no pattern whatsoever, which makes it frustrating to troubleshoot.

I use a Linksys wireless router, and at first I just figured it was just a problem with either that or my cable modem. I bypassed the router altogether (by unplugging it) and power cycled the modem but the problem still persisted. I called Time Warner to have them check my modem and they said everything looked good but reset it anyway. It came back up but was still doing the same thing. I told them I would work on it more myself and let them know if I wanted them to ship me a new modem but I wanted to make sure that was the problem.

I did some speed tests on it at a couple online speed test sites and it was 1050 - 1073kbps each time, and this is on different nights.

I have run some ping tests in the network utility but I get 0% packet loss on pretty much every site I ping, and once in a while I will get 2% packet loss - no big deal.

I have a WinXP Dell laptop for work, so I reconnected the router and fired that up to test the internet speed on it. Sure enough, no problems whatsoever. In fact, there were times I would load up a page on my iMac and give it a "head start", then TYPE in the url on my Dell laptop, and it would come up almost instantly - and these weren't cached sites either.

I have this problem in both Safari and Firefox and for the life of me can't figure it out. It's pretty obvious to me that I can isolate the problem on my Mac since the laptop has no internet issues whatsoever and the fact that this just randomly started happening. I haven't recently installed any updates or software that could of caused this.

I'm pretty much a newcomer to Apple (even though I grew up on an Apple IIe and B/W macintosh) but I'm a 5 year PC tech with a law firm and work on Windows machines all day so I like to think I know something, heh.

Any help would be much appreciated because I've had to resort to using the WinXP laptop because I can't handle the lack of net speed on the Mac

It reminds me of the dark days of dial-up! So annoying!!! And what may be even more annoying is that it doesn't happen everytime I open a page - sometimes I can go to a site, it opens fine, but then I go to it again 1 minute later and it hangs. Also, a lot of time I can "stop" the problem if I stop the page from loading, then reload it. Then it will open up fine.

Here's a screenshot of the problem - picture this screen for 20-30 seconds while a page opens up.

[clyde2801]

Have you tried repairing permissions under disk utility? Ran Onyx?

Or, try downloading opera for mac, and see if that makes any difference. Opera seems to run faster than safari or firefox.