Googles dark fiber project near you ?
download and use these three FREE (home version) utilities:
CCleaner (run this first)
Avast anti virus
MalwareBytes
It could be many things. Are you logging on with a wire or wireless? Have you tried Firefox?
I live out in the sticks and was seeing almost exactly the same thing as you a couple of years ago on my DSL modem.
I switched modems and went with a single router/modem combo and things got a lot better, but still not great because of my location and phone line age leading to our house, they were put in back in the 50’s and are filled with water now they said.
AT&T finally got U-Verse connected out as far as I was and it all went away for me.
Clean out your “cookie jar” and restart your computer.
Make sure you are not signed into a data mine like Facebook.
Another GOOD utility is Combofix, available from BleepingComputer.
Have you tried a different computer?
You must have Comcast. /s
And do what Geron suggested with Firefox.
It lets you manage your cookies with much greater ease and discretion than IE.
With Firefox you can see just who has got what in the way of “analytics” on your machine. I’ll wager you’re going to be *very* surprised.
get a USB “live disc” and boot it up instead of Windows (do not INSTALL it though) and run Firefox or Pale Moon and see if there are any issues.
Although the most likely problem is your connection. Sometimes a loose wire outside will whip around in the wind and cause a connection to be intermittent.
I was having problems with FR too, turns out that my dog didn’t like the attention I was paying to the stories you guys post and was chewing on my internet cable.
and use the duckduckgo.com search engine, they won’t track you
Spyware is often downloaded in web-based advertising and lies dormant waiting to be activated. There are some very obscure ways that it can become active, many of which do not require you to click on anything.
Even "trustworthy" sites may carry brokered adverts from unchecked sources which contain spyware. And "trustworthy" sites can be compromised for weeks before the operators detect the problem.
Your best bet is to scan your entire system with a commercial anti-virus utility and see if it detects anything.
Regular purging of your browser caches and temporary file areas is helpful too.
That will tell you loads
It will save your settings, data, bookmarks, and applications.
Took me a couple + hours and now it looks just like my Win 7 pro. Much more security in this version.
Getting to use it is fairly easy.
I would think govt snooping is just that. They watch where you go, but don’t limit access. Why would they? If you are up to no good, they want as much info on you and where you go as possible.
Modems and routers do go bad. Usually they act erratically before they completely die. I’ve had bad/noisy DSL signals coming into the house a couple of times that were due to hardware faults after a storm. I’ve had windows and browser updates that were unstable and I had to backdate the system to get things running smoothly again. A couple times I’ve had malware sneak in, but those instances are usually the easiest to find and resolve.
There is a disturbance of some kind going on.
Or maybe just a lot of people streaming video.
If you go with Firefox, add NoScript and Ghostery. It’s a little inconvenient while you are picking what to let through and what to block, but once you get it set up and use them a while, it gets simpler. And if you want to be lazy and let down your guard to ‘enjoy’ the full experience of a site, you just copy the web address, launch IE, paste the address, and get the full benefits and costs of a site loaded with scripts and tracking (spy) ware.