My Dad just bought a new Dell Vista machine. First thing I have noticed is that the network performance is crap. He keeps getting page cannot be displayed errors in his browser, timeouts, and really bad download speeds.

When I do a ping test from the command window I see that every 4th packet is getting a really long response time. In addition to this some packets are timing out. He'll also get some messages in the ping report that his own IP address cannot be contacted. Really strange stuff that I've never seen before but I've not had a lot of experience with Vista.

He had the Time Warner cable technician come out and he checked the modem which he says is fine. The tech also plugged his own laptop in and the ping tests were just fine. This is leading me to believe it's something with Vista.

I have not called Dell support yet. Just wondering if anyone has had any issues or experience with Vista networking.

If I can't help him get this resolved we are either shipping it back to Dell or loading XP on it.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!