Well, i ended up moving some things arond the house, and now both my laptop and the desktop are plugged dirrectly into the router. And I am having the exact same problem. But, I realized that my wife is working right next to me, and she using remoted desktop over VPN on her office machine. So, now I am wondering if my network is just oversaturated. I need to look into a better router. I need to decide whether to add a 2nd router to the network, or figure out how to replace verizon's router entirely.