Download Speed

[bop319]

Hello everybody! I don't really know wether my problem is soft- or hardware related so I'll just see what kind of ideas people come up with.

I've recently bought a Vaio SZ2XP which was quite a performance boost compared to my last compaq and of course (like a lot of people I guess) I instantly tried to run and install all sorts of programs to see how my new performance was. After trying all this I came to the stage that my laptop was beginning to get a bit slower, so I decided to recover it to it's original stage.

Sombody then gave me a copy of the pre-release Windows Vista and I thought to give it a try and see how it looks. ( I can tell you it looks great, can't wait for the release). But anyway, one thing struck me which was the following.

I've got a 16Mbps internet connecton at home using a wireless router. If I download from newsgoups using XP i get an average speed of about 7 to 800 Kbps. I did the same thing under Vista and my average speed was 1300Kbps (so 1,3Mbps!!!).

I know Vista is said to be better, but I think an increase of more than 50% is a bit too much. Is there anyone who can tell me why my download speed using XP is so much lower?

Sorry about the long text, but trying to give all the info.

Thanks!
Ciao

[kee-lo_]

Your connection is actually 16 megabits per second, so you should be able to get in theory around 1400k/sec from your newsgroup service.

Have you tried the test service from Giganews? It's at http://www.giganews.com/test_connect.html

[HITS-UK]

You need to be really careful with reported internet speeds as these can be drastically affected by the target servers that they talk to. Internet speed can be roughly segmented into two sections:

1. the physical speed of your connection which is in MBPS (mega-bits-per-second) and

2. the response speed of the target server

As far as (1) is concerned, you may be paying for a 2Mb xDSL service but be careful as this usually reflects the incoming data stream speed and not the bi-directional speed. The other thing to remember is that mega-bits-per-second is NOT the same as MegaBytes per second! For the mathematically inclined there are 8 bits in 1 byte so you should be able to work the rest out.

Finally (as I am sure you are all bored to death by now) the speed of the target server will also affect the percieved response speed of the link. If you have a busy server then you will find that the whole thing seems to be slow. The number of live sessions on a single server will dictate performance.

Hope this helps.