i first noticed this issue while playing NEStalgia, as i was being disconnected every 2 minutes or so. however, i have discovered that this is not specific to that game. it's specific to the BYOND pager itself.

here are some facts:

--Sony Vaio laptop running Vista (unfortunately)
--using speedtest.net on Chrome, ping is anywhere from 12-18 seconds. approx. 50 Mbps down / 10 Mbps up.
--when i log into BYOND, it says i am logged in Offline, and i have to wait approx. 1 minute before the NEStalgia servers come up in the pager.
--as soon as i log into BYOND, even before trying to load NES, if i run a new speedtest, my numbers are more like 5-8 Mbps down / 3 Mbps up, sometimes worse. sometimes the upload portion of the test errors out entirely.
--my roommate is sitting not 5 feet away from me on his laptop playing NES with no issues. his machine runs XP and he is of course on the same network as i am. the fact that i am logged in is not killing his connection at all.
--i have flushed the BYOND cache, flushed my DNS cache, reinstalled BYOND, rebooted several times, and disabled Norton. none of these steps helped.
--this was not a problem last time i played, which was 3 nights ago.

before anyone suggests it, no, i have not tried wiring my laptop to the router or straight to the modem. for some reason the ethernet port on my laptop does not recognize any networks when i plug it in, so at least for the moment it's not even an option. i shouldn't have to do this anyway, because my roommate's laptop is also connected wirelessly and he is not having any problems. clearly the issue is with my laptop, not my network.

any help would be greatly appreciated :)