Bizarre speed issue

slipd · 15 Oct 2010 at 15:21

Hi guys,

My Dad has recently upgraded to an 8MB (previously on 2MB) connection but is unable to get above 2MB (if he's lucky) on his AMD Duron machine.

My Blackberry gets faster download speeds when connected to his wireless and his neighbour upstairs gets the full 7.5MB of his bandwidth when we let him connect… its weird. I'm starting to suspect its his actual machine and we have tried everything on it; wired/wireless adaptors, safe mode with no services running (I did suspect at one point that it might have been his Sygate firewall playing up, but I've uninstalled that now) but nothing seems to up his speed?

Anything else I could try?

Cheers,

SW.

SupermotoMX · 15 Oct 2010 at 21:09

might sound wierd, but has he disconnected the modem waited abit and hooked it back up? should force it to re sync to the 8mb speed

Mattus · 15 Oct 2010 at 22:34

SupermotoMX said:
might sound wierd, but has he disconnected the modem waited abit and hooked it back up? should force it to re sync to the 8mb speed

But there's nothing wrong with the modem, as another computer gets a 7.5Mb speed!

What is the spec of the machine? If it's an older Duron machine, it's close to being museum material. In particular, what are the network adapters, and how are they connected to the machine? If the motherboard's that old, it might not even support USB 2.0, which would restrict the speeds a lot.

slipd · 15 Oct 2010 at 23:00

Yeah, the sync/speed has never been an issue. It's just his machine... The mobo definitely has support for usb 2.0. It's a 1200 duron with 768MB of ram.

When wired, he's using an onboard broadcom chipset and I've just today installed a new pci wireless adaptor and its the same with both of them - seriously reduced speeds

Mattus · 15 Oct 2010 at 23:23

Hmm. Open the task manager and go to the networking tab. What link speed is shown? And if you do an online speed test with the task manager open, does the network utilisation graph show a more-or-less flat line, or does it spike?

slipd · 16 Oct 2010 at 13:02

Mattus said:
Hmm. Open the task manager and go to the networking tab. What link speed is shown? And if you do an online speed test with the task manager open, does the network utilisation graph show a more-or-less flat line, or does it spike?

I'll check that out later - I'm heading round there in a bit!

I've also taken a copy of slax and a long network cable to test the wired connection on the master socket from a clean os

slipd · 16 Oct 2010 at 16:30

Right, I tried slax it and was fine?! I was getting the full 7.5MB :eek:

My conclusion; to re-install windows in the week. There's obviously soemthing wrong there...

slipd · 21 Oct 2010 at 21:23

I've re-installed windows xp on the machine and the issue remains...

So, speeds are fine with a guest os (slax) but with windows, there's an issue :mad:

Any ideas?