ping rates

I have MSI K7N2 Delta Motherboard, 2.4 Athlon XP processor, Geforce 4Ti4600 platinum graphics card, 512 DDR memory, XP Home edition, 1024 Creative Labs soundcard, BT broadband connection.

Anyway at the start of the week I had all of the above except I was running Windows ME and had a steady average ping rate of approx 50.

Had XP installed and they have tripled. In the morning/afternoon the ping rate is low, but at night it goes up and sometimes fluctuates wildly.

I tried another PC I have at the same time it was high and the ping would appear the same, but I'm not convinced it's nothing to do with my machine.

Does anyone have any ideas how to lower it again or is it simply the telephone service providor who's at fault.

Any suggestions to do with my machine, simpletons language please, XP is brand new to me.

Thanks in advance.

what exactly are you pinging?
also winxp sometimes reserves about 5-10% of your bandwidth for qos (quality of service) applications, to make sure these apps have bandwidth when needed. THere is no reason why you need it, but you can try to learn more about it if it is active. To see if this is in use, open up network connections-->right click on network connection you are using-->see if qos is listed as an installed component
I also think there is a registry key to control it, but dont know what it is off the top of my head.