Every couple of days I have to reset my Router to get my PC to show 1000Mbps, but then without fail it will get set back to 10Mbps? I have no idea why this is happening and its a real pain in the butt.
Defective cable or port most likely. If replacing the cable doesn’t work, try checking the driver version for the network interface on your PC in device manager. Check the advanced settings. Try forcing 1 gb mode there. If that fails, try rolling back the driver. Sometimes windows will update those drivers alongside other windows updates. If you’re still SOL but other devices are fine, it’s most likely a defective network card. Disable it and get a cheap replacement. A PCI express replacement is preferred, but USB ones have come to perform really well, in general. But you still have more bandwidth available and lower latency directly on the PCI-E bus. But USB is an option if you don’t have any spare slots.
Do you sleep/suspend/hibernate your PC?
It could be the NIC not renegotiating after waking up.I do not, no.
Inappropriate cable?
More likely defective than inappropriate. Even CAT5e and even most CAT5 cables can handle 1gb. It would have to be some really old cable from the 1990s to not be able to handle 1gb, provided it’s not defective.
Yes, that’s very true. But worth remembering that while you can usually get away with cat 5 for 1gbps, that’s only up to a certain length, depending on the quality of the cable. If your cable is in or around the threshold for that particular cable where noise picks up, you could get inconsistent speeds like OP is.
In my experience, that threshold was around 100 feet, unless the cable was pretty low quality. I do kind of doubt the OP has runs like that, but I did make the disclaimer about CAT5 by saying most CAT5. There used to be some low quality stuff out there but fortunately, stuff that bad was in the minority. Even though I’m not in a huge city, I was actually lucky enough to be a test market for Time Warner Cable’s Roadrunner, back when it started up in the late 90s. So I still have some of the really old stuff in boxes 🙂