I am going to guess the black box you mention is either a router or a modern. Un plug the power from the back of it, if you have a second box that might be a router if the other is a modem, un plug the power from the back of it to, totally shut down the computer, let it be for 5 minutes or so, then plug the power back into the modem let it be so all the lights can get set, if you have a router go ahead and plug the power into the back of it, let those lights get set, then turn on the computer, boot it up and see if that helps. Usually it does help to do a power down, then power up in the proper sequence. You really need to give us more information to go on here, which version of windows you have, are you using cable, dsl, dialup or what to connect to the Internet.

Please please please do not change your LONG safe secure passcode to something like butterfly it is long and made of various characters for a reason!! It is keeping you secure. I personally never change mine I do write it down on a slip of paper and tape it to the router. To get it someone has to be in my house. If you do decide to do this which I warn you highly to be thoughtful of, you must choose a LONG password that is NOT a real word but made up of letters and numbers and characters. Create a sentence and use the first letter of each for example. If you have 3 children Bob, Ted, Alice you could do BTA*79*81*83*1950 that is the 3 first letters of the children *79 would be Bobs age etc for each childs age and the last 1950 could be the year you were married or you were born etc. those are things you would remember but do contain all of the required characters. JUST do NOT use any real words. another option is to download a very simple little program that lets you type in any phrase and it will translate that into the proper code needed. so you can type in something like I like to ride bikes and swim and it turns that easy to remember phrase into the long complicated key code, but all you need to remember is the easy phrase. WIFI Key Generator 1.0 I have seen some routers that have that built in and allow you to do that.

that link scanner has been a big problem in AVG at various times, I would try doing as one person suggested and disable that link scanner from AVG and see if that works. AVG in their FAQ in fact tells how to install AVG with out the link scanner since it causes so many problems. Frequently Asked Questions this is the reply I am referring to by ripling "I tracked my particular problem to AVG 9 , specifically the AVG Active Surf-Shield in their LinkScanner, I unticked that & all has been fine since apart from not having that particular component of AVG available to use." Of course you can always try reverting back to an earlier version of Firefox which it seems many there have done and it seems to go back to normal. do you have the no script add on in your firefox by chance? I see in some threads there may be an issue with it causing a similar problem, however the most recent update of no script supposedly fixes it. from over on BBR I found this comment "tool>options>security uncheck block reported attack sites and block reported web forgeries. restart firefox and see if that helps" There is a new release candidate of firefox that you can give a try if you want to do that, see if it makes any difference new Firefox! seems to be a problem many are trying to find a cure for and none I have seen is the end all be all fix, some things work for some not for others. Those are so difficult to dig out the root cause.

How is this stuff measured? My cable run is buried all the way from the pole, about 300 feet away, to my basement. There it goes to a passive splitter and one branch goes to the cable modem and the other branch to my home theater room, about 50 "cable feet" away, There, it's split again, with one branch going directly to the TV and the other to the cable box. Everything is working fine, but each of these splitters reduce the signal strength. I'm thinking of adding another splitter to run a cable to another room, but am concerned about loss of signal strength and I don't want to run the new cable if this won't work.