NB skip down to the bottom for tips, and sorry for the long post but I am happy
Looks like I will be with TalkTalk for the foreseeable. I've tested it the last couple of days and the ping results were initially disappointing enough for me to consider cancelling and trying another ISP.
However, with a bit of persistance through the automatic telephone hurdles and discussions with the tech support people they seem to have come up trumps. My ping on our main servers have dropped to around 32/36 this morning WOOHOO. With the old Virgin account I was getting 44/48 ish and with the initial setup on TalkTalk yesterday this rose to around 52/60 ish.
Strangely, even with the higher ping yesterday, dodges and jumps seemed more responsive, zippy even
Although the Indian Call Centre people yesterday were polite and tried to help, they failed to improve things much (the language barrier/difficulty with accent didn't help) ... However, the Irish Call Centre chap today grasped what I wanted straight away, did a couple of tests, reset several settings and Voila ! (Cheers Steve). I know that Asian call centres are cheaper for the ISP, but until the language difficulties are eliminated then companies really do risk losing business through frustration etc (I really was on the point of cancelling).
Anyway, keep your heads down tonight ... I will be taking pot shots
Most of you probably already know the following with adsl2+ (I have always been on cable), but just in case I will summarise what got me the result ...
Several things that improved ping and things
Keep the modem switched on, or get the ISP to switch off some of it's line monitoring. My new modem gets quite warm when it's running and in the interest of saving electricity (and co-incidentally the planet

) I switched it off when not in use. Unfortunately the ISP has
line monitoring which interpreted my switching off as a problem on the line. So it automatically downgraded me from 20 to 8 meg in an attempt to resolve this perceived problem

. Anyway, the Techie tells me he has now disabled this automatic monitoring so now I can switch off as often as I like without incurring an automatic downgrade
Get the
MTU set as high as possible. Mine is set to 1450 now, it used to be 1500 with Virgin and was pre-setmuch lower when I first got the new modem.
TCPoptimizer is a program that I have used for a number of years. It sets various settings on your network card/registry, is easy to use, and makes a backup just in case
http://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php
There are a couple of
tweaks to the registry that I tried yesterday. Probably best not to try these if you are unsure of what you are doing with the registry ... and always make a backup of course

The
first tweak is to set
TcpAckFrequency to 1 (default is 2). This basically reduces the time your pc waits before sending a response. When I tried this it reduced my old ISP ping on our servers from the usual 44 to around 36, with a similar reduction to the new ISP ping so it worked

It is particularly useful if you regularly play on distant servers (eg USA for me) because the improvement in ping is greater with higher pings. The downside is that it also reduces your download/upload speed, so if you dowload a lot of files it might be too much hassle to keep switching the setting in the register each time you want to play

In my case it reduced the dl from about 5.5 to 3.5

and tbh I am happy with around 36 ping gaming on my new settings so I will only use it if I join some online RPG based in the USA.
The
second registry tweak is to set
TCPNoDelay to 1. It basically stops the PC from waiting to batch small packets together into a larger batch. I use XP and I didn't have the MSMQ folder in my registry, but I tried anyway and I'm not sure it worked correctly, the register merge seemed to insert a duplicate set of folders in my registry (which I undid as soon as I saw it). It might have been my error, but I would not recommend this if the MSMQ folder isn't already there.
This is the site that I found these tweaks on (there are other hits in google with the same tweaks)
http://www.sk-gaming.com/content/15500- ... ing_by_150
There are probably other things that I have forgotten, tweaks that the Techie probably didn't tell me he'd done, and further tweaks he could do if the ping still wasn't good ... but it is and hopefully will remain so
