Internet connection question

[Edutainment]

When my brother is playing CS or COD4 online and I'm loading a website or downloading, the game lags. Also my torrent downloads are slow but I'm pretty sure Sympatico is throttling P2P traffic. So my dad called Sympatico and the tech support guy asked how many programs I had installed and I said 100+ and he said that too many programs installed slows down my connection. Is this true, and if so... I unno, advice?

[bicostp]

Of course he'll get lag and you'll get slower download speeds; you only have so much bandwidth alloted to you. (All the extra traffic is clogging your tubes.)

The number of programs you have installed is irrelevant to your network speeds (unless they're things like multiple firewalls, programs that automatically update themselves, and torrent clients, which themselves use bandwidth). If anything, too many programs running will slow down your individual system. I've never seen a computer get extremely slow because it had inactive programs installed.

Generally, don't listen to phone tech support people. They're usually issued a handbook of common problems and answers and couldn't do real-world problem selving to save their own keisters.

[Edutainment]

That's what I thought lol thanks