I have a Cricket brand USB modem. i have their fastest, most expensive monthly plan. ($60 a month for unlimited) i have a brand new Win7 home premium 64 bit OS Dell inspirion laptop with AMD Phenom ii x3 CPU. 4GB DDR3 RAM. my laptop itself is fast. applications load pretty must instantly. it took practically no time at all to install sims3 and 2 expansions. internet connection is fast at the library, mall, Burger King and my best friend's house (fastest at my friend's house) but it is super slow with my cricket. i have three out of four bars at most times in my bedroom. the modem didn't use to be this slow. but the past few days it has taken a very long time to load a simple webpage. (2-3 minutes for a webpage 15-20 minutes for a 3-4 minute youtube video at least)

i have mcafee, kaspersky, and avast on my computer and run them frequently. i set all three to run last night (back to back) as well as defragmenter, i also ran ccleaner and disk cleanup.

i use google chrome. my internet connection used to be faster but recently has slowed down significantly. my modem gets really hot really fast. i left it unplugged over night too cool down one night and plugged it back in when i got home from work and it got extremely hot within 10-15 minutes. (i dont know if that is related or not but i thought i'd mention it.

i just wanna know what might be causing my internet to be slower than usual and what i can do to fix it. and if i need to buy a new modem then what can i do for the next month while i ride the rest of the month i've paid for out?