What makes PING increase?

[Francisco]

hi, few days ago a noticed that my ping is higher than usual which is outta normal. The comon ping i had in servers ( once im european ) was around 80 in German servers, 60 in England ones, 40 in local and 120 in American's.

 The only thing that used to increase for sudden my ping was when my antivirus was updating but it only wud take around 1 minute and then it wud come down to normal!

 But like since three days ago my ping increased and what used to be 80 is now 330, and you dont even want to imagine in american servers what number it gets!! I have like a shooting delay of almoust two seconds, it is really pissing me off cuz im not seeing where the problem is!

 So all this story to come to this question, what makes your ping goes up?? I dont have nothing oppened or running, no MSN, no xfire, irc, wmp, ie opened, nothing, i start the computer and after it's inicialized and stable i just open paintball and ping is 300, 400, 500...

 HELP!!!

tx

Vouvos_Apeida

[lekky]

try running some anti virus and spyware programs. Spyware could be doing it.

[jitspoe]

It can also be caused by a poor physical connection.  Try disconnecting and reconnecting all of your cables. 

On the software side, make sure to get rid of all the junk on startup.  In XP, you can just do start|run|"msconfig".  Go to the "startup" tab and uncheck everything, then go to the "Services" tab and check "Hide all microsoft services", and uncheck what's left.