Broadband question

[Den]

Me and nephew sitting on couch, both with laptops. His, a wee scabby one, and mine a previously good one.
Virgin media with wireless router

Both do simultaneous broadband speed check via u switch.

His is getting 6.3mb
Mine is getting 1.3mb

I know very little about the magic of how these things work, but would have thought we should be receiving the same amount of broadbands.

Educate me please. Interwebbing at the moment is slower than a 1200 on a flatbed on a bumpy road in a traffic jam in the dark with an AA man who is depressed because his dog has died and his wife has left him and he has recieved his redundancy notice in the the same post as his prostate cancer test results.

 

[Fanum]

It depends how they are set up Den......you may have all sorts of settings that make a difference.

Make sure you have the latest drivers for the slow one......go to control panel, system, device manager, network controller to see what sort of gadget there is inside it and write down what it is, then go to the website of the manufacturer and see if there is a new driver for it.

You could try the windows update site as well (start: all programs: windows update) to see if that picks up any new stuff for it.


There's a useful little prog you could try that would give all the information needed to look under the bonnet of what's happening HERE as well.......if you post the logs of the results, it would be possible to compare how the two machines are set up

 

[cookie]

simultaneous? really?

there's only so many broadbands to go around. try doing one at a time,

 

[tuftywhite]

Could be yours has a slower wireless card. Depends how old it is. As always, things move on, newer laptops have faster wireless cards. Try using an ethernet (network) cable plugged directly into the back of your modem, then testing the speed. You may want to switch off wireless on the laptop first.

 

[E. Buygum]

The best way to check BB speed is by a wired connection from PC to router. You must make sure no-one else is using the connection while you do the test...otherwise it's a bit like checking water flow rates into a house through several taps at the same time and wondering why all the results are different and slow. The new ("Beta test") speed tester from BT seems to be very accurate and it runs very quickly: http://www.speedtester.bt.com/.

 

[(RIP) Kaister]

wireless N

wireless G

diff spec of network card ?

N being faster

 

[Packer]

+1 onb the tap analogy.

Disable wirelss on one run speed tester on the other. Inverse, repeat.

 

[Roymondo]

Also if the shiny laptop was downloading e.g. a Windows update as a background process, the speed testing program/website would indicate a slower speed than was actually being achieved (on account of it having to share the broadband "pipe" with the background process.


---
I am here: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=52.253240,-1.152343

 

[Pukmeister]

Could also be worth investing in a newer and quicker WiFi card or USB dongle for the old laptop (and disabling the built-in wifi it has) to get better WiFi speed.

I recently had major hassles with my ever-growing home wireless network, my Wireless N300 router would freeze up, resetting only offered a temporary reprise as did changing WiFi channels.

I now invested £150 in a brand new top spec Wireless N750 router with simultaneous 5GHz and 2.4Ghz bandwidth, so all the modern kit used like Macbooks, iPads, iPhones etc can take advantage of the 5Ghz frequency whilst older kit can still run on 2.4GHz.

Biggest culprit for hogging bandwidth is my sons Xbox360 when online gaming.