My cable service has always had a surprisingly good speed.
I recently got a new computer with faster (2 GB) CPU, 2GB RAM, and still running XP Home.
I haven’t tested the cable service speed for some time, but decided to check it yesterday. The download speeds on PC Pitstop and Cox’s speed test site have almost doubled.
It seems hard to believe that the computer speed affects this, but perhaps it does. Anybody know for sure?
Not unless you used to have a ridiculously slow computer. The download speeds you’re going to get from a cable internet connection will be much, much slower than the data rate that your computer could handle.
Computer speed can make a difference. The higher the data rate the more difference computer speed will make. But it probably has more to do with the new computer having a better network card with better divers. That are better able to move the data around.
I don’t think a faster processor should affect your download speed much, if at all, all else being equal.
My guess would be that the difference would be due to your virus scanner. Either you don’t have one on your new machine, or you have a better one, or it just does its job quicker due to the faster processor. I’m not positive whether those speed test sites would factor in the time it took for your machine to scan the file, but that’s my WAG.
It’s probably not the speed of your new computer that is causing your download speeds to be faster, but certain TCP/IP settings that the new computer came with that the computer manufacturer set as part of the “operating system build”.
In theory, you could have tweaked those settings on your old computer to improve your download speed.
This link from Broadband Reports describes some of the settings in layman terms…
Hard drive speed can definitely affect download speed, even at cable internet speeds. But speed test programs probably don’t save all the data they download, so it’s probably not a factor.
What speeds are you getting exactly? Is it possible that your old computer was connecting to the cable modem with either a USB 1 port or a 10 Mbps ethernet port? Either one can be a bottleneck.
There are registry tweaks you can put in place to affect download speeds. The rate increase can be dramatic if you put the right tweak in place. Your new computer is probably just optimized better than your old one.
The cable service will sometimes provide upgrades without informing you. I’ve had that happen several times with my service over the last several years. Likely, you had an upgrade since the last time you checked and hadn’t noticed until you got the new computer.
It shouldn’t affect things, but it can. How old was your old PC?
My mom had a really old laptop (replaced with a new one last fall, fortunately) that got horrendously bad speeds, even when just browsing web pages. DSL was as slow as dialup, but just on this one computer. None of the other computers on the same router were having problems. It wasn’t the registry tweaks either, as I checked on that personally. It was just a really old system being pushed beyond its limits.
Hard drive speed will not be significant factor. Even some of the sadder examples of IDE from a few years back could move 10+megabytes per second a 10 megabit ethernet connection moves data at 1/8 of that speed. That of course assumes your internet connection is faster than 10 megabit. The comcast line in my shop regularly clocks in the 18-20 megabit range still only about 2 megabytes per second and change. My connection in my shop would be bottlenecked by a 10megabit ethernet card, your average 1.5-3 megabit home DSL customer wouldn’t know the difference.
A Motorola 68020, which is roughly equivalent to an Intel 80386 for speed, and more than 20 years old, can handle a fully loaded 10 megabit/s Ethernet link. Modern processors are much, much faster.
Just another thing to check in regarding to software the cable company wants you to install. Some of these do “load balancing”, that is, they throttle the connection. If you don’t load load their software, no throttling.
You never need their software, it’s never a good idea to install it. Many of them are also essentially spyware.
It’s not download speed causing the problem here, it’s page rendering speed. It actually takes significant horsepower to assemble modern graphics-heavy web pages.
As I discovered a few weeks ago when using iCab 2.99 on a PowerMac 8100/80 (which has an 80-MHz PPC 601 processor). Individual pages of the SDMB took about five minutes to render. On my MacBook Pro (2.16-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo), they render as fast as the data arrives.