What can you suggest is causing our housemate's laptop to stop the rest of our internets working?

Probably file sharing like bittorrent. I’m going to over simplify things.

When your computer asks for data on the Internet the other computer waits for a ACK packet. This pretty much says that you got the last bit, now send the next. If they are using bittorent the other computer might not be getting your ACK packets. So it keeps trying to send the same data over and over again not realizing that you got what was already sent.

Ask your roommate to throttle their upload. I shoot for about 70% of my max upload.

I hope that made sense.

@Ame_Evil My guess is….
Your housemate has a slower wireless.. The router slows down to the slowest piece of equipment on the network. If it acts up while she is doing nothing than… slow wireless.

Try a usb add-on wireless for her laptop.

What @johnpowell said.

She doesn’t have bittorrent. In contrast, me and my other housemate does :D. The only problems we’ve seen is that it ****s up Xbox live when uploading stuff, making it lag a lot but we have learnt to set upload as low.

@Tropical_Willie Do you have a source for this or what is your evidence?

@Tropical_Willie :: is right. But they are also wrong. Even if you drop to the lowest speed your network it will still be faster then the input from your ISP. On a 802.11g the throughput is 22 Mbit/s. I really doubt you are coming close to that in the UK. Something else is wrong.

Does your roommate use Limewire? Or any other file sharing program? If they don’t it could be a virus sending out spam. It could be lots of things. I would suggest they install a good firewall and learn how to use it.

@Ame_Evil

Here’s an article ===>
http://compnetworking.about.com/od/wirelessfaqs/f/mixing80211bg.htm

I’m so confused even though @johnpowell tried to explain it simply. We’re having a huge issue similar to this, but no one knows who could be causing the problem

@casheroo

Try elimination.
1) All laptops use wireless.
2) One use Ethernet; all others use wireless
3) Rotate who is using Ethernet.
The other thing is make sure each laptop or computer has latest drivers from manufacturer.

@Tropical_Willie Yeah, I don’t even know what you’re talking about. We have three to four laptops using one router…my father just bought an expensive one, because we thought the cheapo one wasn’t doing it’s job. I personally think it’s my brother and his playstation 3, but he denied using the internet on it..but I think he then said it works fine for him. When my husband and I had our apartment, anytime he tried to use the ps3 internet, it sucked the internet from my laptop and I couldn’t do anything.

@casheroo I don’t have a PS3 but try connectiing the PS3 to router on a network cable, if speed increases for all other users. The PS3 is the resource hog. MAKE sure to change network setting on the PS3 from wireless to….

Now that I think of it he may just have the network wireless turned on without connecting to internet.

Many possible causes… most Netgear boxes have some level of ‘logging’ – as a starting point, try turning that on and take a look. Will typically be just a list of ‘source’ and ‘destination’ IP addresses (the numbers assigned to each of your machines) with ‘ports’ which would give a hint at where the traffic is (coming and going) and what kind of traffic (different ‘services’ use different ports). Could be laptop has worm/virus/malware and it’s being used to send spam whenever she’s connected…