I have DSL that promises up to 12 MBS download. I have both Ubuntu 10.04 and WinXP Pro on my laptop.
When I use WinXP and test at Speedtest.net, im getting download speed of around 3.5 MBS. I restart and test with Ubuntu and i’m getting a little over 10 MBS. (This is on the same laptop).
I have the latest drivers for when I use WinXP.
Any ideas on why using Windows is slowing me down so much? (this isn’t just tonight, it’s been this way since I got DSL nearly 1 year ago. I haven’t found a good answer anywhere, so i’m finally asking the SD).
As an experiment, I formatted my HD and reinstalled WinXP+latest drivers and reinstalled Ubuntu. Retested. Same thing. 3X faster with Ubuntu. FWIW, I also tested with the old drivers for Windows. In case the newer drivers were the cause of the issue. Same result.
Exactly. Some settings are not the same. WinXP was not tweaked for faster connections, but slower ones.
Another problem can be the Firewall. A software firewall is not used by default in Linux, but is in Windows. Whether one is necessary for Linux, I will let others explain, but I never used one.
Windows (especially XP) is known to be slower than Linux for file transfers. I’m not 100% sure why, but Windows wasn’t originally thought of as a network operating system. For example, in most companies, your “HOME” directory and your applications are all accessed on the local hard drive. Windows 7 does a much better job with networking, but from my experience, Linux and Mac are still faster.
HOWEVER, they aren’t 3x faster. My assumption is that something else is going on. Do you have an anti-virus program running on your Windows system. Anti-virus programs check and verify each file and sometimes each write. Most Macs and Linux systems don’t have anti-virus programs, and thus don’t have the bottleneck they can create.
Another possibility is that Windows Internet Explorer downloads files first to a working directory, and then to the directory you’ve specified. This can be really bad if your My Documents directory is on a network drive. You have one network connection copying a file over the Internet to your local drive, and then another network copy from your local drive to the network drive.