First let me say long time no see to everyone. I quit CS awhile back but have started playing again here recently. I have a problerm and knew there were some pretty smart cookies on SFH so I came here for help.

All the sudden when my buddy and I LAN on any Steam server he gets his usual 32 or so ping and either of the other two computers get 200 to 300 plus. Any ideas what is going on here? All the machines are of equal power and set-up with the exception of the graphics cards...his is the best. We are LANing them via a Lynksys router and have contacted their tech support but can't get the pings to equal out. We used to have no problem LANing. Is it possible Steam somehow has it set up to discourage LANing? We usually play on separate teams to avoid the cheating accusations and GHOSTing accusations. It would just be nice to get the same ping from the 2200 down cable connection. Any help would surely be appreciated.

I changed all the computers and the router to 1430,that was one of the things the linksys tech support suggested.

I guess we will see how that works out tonight as this is out traditional "taco's and shoot people night".

One other thing Mass didnt mention that we are having a problem with,at odd times during play,we get the cable disconnected message on all three computers.Linksys has no clue what it is,told me it was a hardware issue,so I put another router in and it still does it.Any ideas will be greatly appreciated as there is nothing so irritating as drawing a bead on that last enemy and seeing the dreaded "warning!!Connection problem!!"

As far as dropping goes its not the modem or ISP,as I can hook up direct to the modem and have zero problems with that computer.

Mass brought his tower over and as far as the ping goes we didnt have a problem......Now i have to figure out what is wrong with my 2 alternate computers that do this.I have checked and swapped the cables,I dont believe that is a problem,as they all run perfectly fine if I go straight into the modem.

I guess my next trial will be to hook up direct to the modem with the PCs that ping bad and see if they still ping bad with no router.

The computer that Mass plays on is a P4 2.8 gig with 512 megs of DDRAM,GeForce2 video card,xp home OS at the moment,and a really crappy ECS P4VXASD2 motherboard,which might possibly be my problem.

The third computer is a dual processor Tyan tiger 133 motherboard,with 2 P3 667 gig processors,512 megs of RAM,a Radeon 7000 video card,and XP pro OS.We havent really tried to play on this one much yet,as I just got it built a couple weeks ago,but it looks like its having the same ping problem as the 2.8 does.

My computer is a 2 gig P4 with a GeForce4 video card,512 megs of RDRAM,XP home OS,and an MSI motherboard that has something wrong with it so that I had to take the side off and put a turbo fan on it so it doesnt shut down on me(looks like Harvs did except I got this darth vader looking turbo-fan on mine).As long as I have my fan on my computer runs sweet for CS or whatever else Im using.

Sometime this week-end Ill hook up to the modem directly and see how that works out,but please keep on with the suggestions,I try all of them,Im not proud.......

Thanks for all the help.

Well the problem on Mass's computer is it has an on-board NIC,and I cant get a plug in NIC card to work on it for some reason.

And I might agree with you on the network thing except one computer on the network runs awesome,and two dont.All the network cards run 10base or 100base,at the moment they are all set at auto-select.If I need to switch them all to 10base half or whatever Im more than happy to try it.

As I said,Im no computer whiz by any means,but dabbling is fun,so let me know what to try and Ill have at it.....

Thanks again for all the help.

have u tried plugging each compluter individually in turn into your modem to see how they play/ping?

It may be that you have a virus on a pc which could be causing massive netweork traffic too?