The fact that it works well sometimes and not other times indicates more than likely a connection issue - not you, but from the router to the ISP and beyond.
At different times of the day, connections are going to be acting differently - for instance, for me it is night right now, and my internet peaks during these times - but early evening it is awful, as most of the neighborhood is using the same Cable service as I am - during the day it is hit and miss, usually depending upon how the overall big picture is looking in terms of the Internet - all the businesses and universities and such have massive amounts of traffic going, and ISPs and the Internet in general gets flooded.
I'd look into those first, as your symptoms don't indicate any real major degradation of performance from your machine, otherwise it would just be getting worse and worse without any real good periods interspersed in there.