Internet connection problem
 

There are two laptops on the wireless connection in my house. One is experiencing no problems.

My laptop, however, is having difficulty loading webpages. Many pages won't load at all; others will load but only after stalling, requiring them to be reloaded repeatedly.

I normally use Firefox, but it's almost incapable of loading any page now, so I've switched to Chrome, which is better, but still runs into the same problems.

Darkest Hour takes much longer than usual to start up, but as soon as I am playing, I have a low ping and no huge lag problems.

Navyfield will not load at all. It's as if it doesn't recognize any connection whatsoever.

Two days ago, my connection was fine. In the morning everything was normal. I made no changes to anything. I came back to it in the evening, and suddenly I have this problem.

Tech support had me disconnect the wireless router and connect directly to the modem, but that produced only a slight improvement.

I have Windows XP SP2.

Any ideas as to what could be causing this?

Thanks

I reinstalled Windows, only to have the problem rear its head again. That's when I noticed the message about Windows automatic updates waiting to be installed which appeared just before my connection went bad.

It appears there is a correlation between automatic updates and my crap connection - when I installed the updates, my connection went back to its former self.

Hopefully this is the answer, because there is an even bigger correlation between my connection dying and me wanting to smash my computer with a sledgehammer. :)