I’m at my wits end currently. Been an on-and-off issue for weeks now, not sure what started it.
I have very good latency and download speeds. Every test I’ve taken shows that hasn’t changed. However, when using a variety of websites, my buffering speed is atrocious. Youtube defaults to the lowest resolution and stops playing seconds in, resulting in an extremely long buffer loop; ads won’t even buffer to completion. Amazon won’t load media or occasionally even pages beyond the home page. Facebook will not load media and won’t scroll down. Various annoying things like that.
Also to be clear, my issue remains isolated to just this machine. Other laptops, consoles, phones, do not have the same issue I’ve been dealing with on my personal PC.
I have tried changing my dns server, I have run integrity scans on my system and on my memory, all of which has come back clean. The only two things that momentarily would fix the issue would be cleaning Microsoft Edge’s browser cache (which has since stopped being useful, or would stop being useful upon relogging into my stuff), and updating my NVIDEA driver offhand once, which seemed to resolve the issue momentarily.
The only thing that 100% without a doubt resolve the problem momentarily is using a VPN. I throw a VPN on, my browser runs smoothly and without any of the previous issues mentioned. I turn it off, it’s back to the same issues. Which makes me think the problem might be network related, but honestly I’m just throwing darts everywhere trying to resolve the root of the problem.
Additional things I’ve tried in vain are resetting my router, restarting my PC, running an entire system scan with Malwarebytes, etc.
If anyone has any insight at all or things that might be worth attempting, I’m all ears.
EDIT: Testing other streaming platforms; some work seamlessly (Netflix, Dropout), others won’t even load the player (Crunchyroll, Amazon Prime Video).