In a bad storm a couple weeks ago I lost 2 cat5 cables, a broadband router, a nice 3com NIC, and a slew of other stuff. I bought a cheapo Linksys NIC to get the cable access up again, and I now see some interesting performance problems when playing online games. In SOF2 and Counterstrike, the ping is very eratic. I know some fluctuation is normal, but not wildly high numbers it goes up to. In Everquest, the "lagometer" shows constant packet loss ranging from 5% to over 60%. Before, there was almost never any packet loss. Could it be that my one remaining working cat5 cable is faulty, is the new cheapo NIC just crap, or is it possible that the cable modem is slightly screwed up?