Loss and Choke - Constant Lag Spikes

iHateLag

<div class="IPBDescription">I'm in tears..</div>Ok, so i've put up with it for long enough!
I just never bothered to register and ask the question.. lol

So here is my plea of help.

The Hardware:
Im running off wireless (Apple Airport Extreme Base Station) That is connected to my modem which in turn sends internet to my PC.
I just bought a new linksys wireless card for my PC too.

Now Ive had the same wireless for 3 years now and I used to play a bit of BF2 and that NEVER lagged let alone the spikes i get in NS.
Ive been playing NS on and off since 1.04 and only after i wiped my computer and put windows Vista on it.. (not sure if its vista tho) that I got these heavy lag spikes that lasts 2 - 3 seconds.

What happens:
Frequently every 20 or so seconds (not exact it just happens ALOT) I get a mass 9 - 12 loss and choke and I spike up to 600+ ping for those few seconds.. Which as we all know is enough to screw your game up and frustrate you to hell. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tounge.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":p" border="0" alt="tounge.gif" />

Is there some way i can reduce the lag or rid of it?
Let it be Rates (all of my NS is default i have changed anything other than video settings) or drivers or vistas damn annoying security or what?

Any sort of help would be great, I dont know detail about computers and commands and whatnot so please explain in detail!!

Cheersss!
Bobby

Thansal

honestly, the most likely culprit IS wireless, and it really is what you should check first. Just get your self a nice long piece of cat5 and snake it all over your house to the modem, it isn't going to be permanent, just to check this. It is the cheapest and fastest thing you can do.

The other options ARE:
1) Use the default setup tools for NS/Steam to set your connection type. Honestly, you rarely should have to tweak your network settings, and especially not with something like this (a problem that was consistent, yah, possibly, but not some thing like this).

2) Make sure all of the random vista internet apps are off. Unfortunately, I don't know what they are, the culprits in XP were the firewall and QoS Packet Scheduler.

3) Make sure you turn off all of your other programs (antivir etc).

4) Make sure you are malware free.

However, I still suggest you just grab that cat5 and run it to your router first.

xtremecore

I think someone posted an issue with this, however for some reason on dual core processors, NS will have a tendancy to run in what i like to call "speed motion" because everything is as if it was in fast foward, you walk faster, shoot faster only in the ready room though.

When you join a game, everything goes to a crawl and you have to deal with spikes every few seconds.

To remedy this problem,

ALT+TAB out of game and CTRL+ALT+DELETE and get your task manager open.

Right click on hl.exe and set your affinity to one core, either one doesnt matter, just as long as one of them is <b>NOT</b> checked.

Then ALT+TAB back into NS.

The annoyance is that you'll have to do this task EVERYTIME you start up NS, but it took me months to find out what the problem was and how to fix it. This has been the only fix that has been successful.