Hey everyone--thanks for checking this out. Here's what I got: HP 8460P laptop running Windows 7 Pro 64 bit. 8 gigs of ram and plenty of memory so we should hum along fine. The 82579LM gigabit network adapter comes as standard. Utilizing CenturyLink DSL with speeds of around 7 MB down and about 1 MB up max coming into a TP-Link TD-W8980 router with gigabit ports and connected directly by a cat 5E ethernet connection.
My problem is this: I can almost never get even half of that DSL speed to my computer. Sometimes it moves pretty well, but most of the time (especially lately) it's been frustratingly slow. I get a steady 7 mb to the router, but things seems to be bogging down between there and my laptop. Tweaked Chrome, DNS settings, etc and nothing changed. Today I uninstalled the network adapter and reinstalled a fresh one, thinking maybe the glitch is in there. Should be the latest and greatest driver, etc--ProSet 20.0.10.0 is what is says when I open properties and the driver version is 12.10.29.0. Link Speed shows I'm auto negotiating at 1 gb full duplex. I even ran the diagnostics to check everything, and that's where it gets interesting...
All of the diagnostic tests under Link Speed come up green and mean, EXCEPT for the Cable Quality Status and the Cable Integrity Status. No matter what I do--swap out cables, switch ports, change inputs (I have a dock for my laptop, and I've tried both wiring into the dock and bypassing it directly to the laptop) it fails both of these tests. Is this my problem? Is there a setting somewhere that can fix it? And are there any tweaks on the Advanced tab that might help a clean, fast signal get through without bogging down? Been around and around on this and come up short everywhere I've turned. Hopefully someone here can help--thanks!