Developer Forum

A couple of weeks ago a friend told me he was getting less
than 200Kbps download speeds with his Adelphia cable
modem. It was right after the weekend of storms and I
first thought perhaps they had something to do with it
although I had heard of modems getting disconnected but
not simply slowed down. I was unable to ping his machine
or his gateway (timed out) so I called Adelphia tech
support and they were unable to contact him either and
decided he had a problem.

The next day I went to George's house and took my laptop
(Dell Inspiron 8100) with me. We spent a good deal of
time on the phone with Adelphia at various levels but
noone could come up with a solution. I finally decided to
hook his modem (Toshiba PCX 2200) with his ethernet cable
to my laptop and voila, I obtained speeds about 1.4Mbps,
right in line with expectations. Tests were done with
www.toast.net, a site recommended by Adelphia. In the
right window of that page there is a link "Performance
Test" (small type, look closely for it) which takes you to
a page asking for ISP, connection type, and host web
server. I entered the ISP as Adelphia, the connection as
cable modem, and left the server as the free Toast net.

On the left side of the page are a number of tests and I
chose "All of the above".

With those parameters specified I clicked the button "Run
Tests" and sat back and waited. My machine consistently
gave speeds of about 1.5Mpbs while George's machine (Dell
Dimension 8100) continues to give anywhere from a couple
of hundred Kbps down to 4Kbps. The highest he's seen is
about 400Kbps.

I removed all application programs and processes/services
that I could but that had no effect. I also ran a
complete virus scan and an Ad-Aware scan looking for
troublesome programs. In addition, I ran it in Safe Mode
with Network connections. Nothing helps.

Any body have any suggestions? Is it hardware?

There are a lot of reasons why you'd get different speeds. One obvious
reason might be that one computer is faster or better equipped.... faster
hard drive, more memory, faster processor. But that still shouldn't account
for that much of a dramatic difference in throughput.

Here's what I'd recommend.

From the slow machine, go to http://www.yqcomputer.com/ . On their BROADBAND
menu, go to their Broadband Tools, and check out their SG TCP/IP Analyzer.
There they will check out your network settings and make recommendations.
They also have a phenominal tool that you can download, called the SG TCP/IP
optimizer (it's free), which you can use to tune up your settings with a
couple clicks of the mouse instead of digging through the registry. Or, if
you prefer, they do have all the gorey details explained at speedguide.net.

Cheers!

Mike Pearl