new PC lower speed

[th'engineer]

I have been helping my neighbour with his new PC the old one worked perfect with the stb. But the new one seens to have problems with speed at up and downloading.

I was wondering if anyone else found problems the old one 500Mhz P111 with 128mb ram OS ME,Zone alarm connected via NIC.

New one XP2800 512meg ram XP OS all patched Zone alarm connected via NIC.

Any ideas do you think it may be overdriving the 4000 STB he has working at higher speed

[Paul K]

Have you ran any tweaks on the XP pc?
http://www.dslreports.com/tweaks what report do you get here?
Are there any applications or services hampering the CPU?

[th'engineer]

Have you ran any tweaks on the XP pc?
http://www.dslreports.com/tweaks what report do you get here?
Are there any applications or services hampering the CPU?
done the tweeks no different

Tried it on my connection works a treat only difference is 6 foot between them mine being a 2000 STB and his a 4000STB

[Paul K]

So it runs fine on your STB but when connected to his it suffers a go slow? Was he using his cable to connect to your STB or did he use yours?

[th'engineer]

So it runs fine on your STB but when connected to his it suffers a go slow? Was he using his cable to connect to your STB or did he use yours?
His own, the one he had connected to the 500 Mhz machine.

I connected via one of my router ports to test the PC.

[Paul K]

So the only thing that changes is the STB? Has he rebooted his STB since changing his PC? Is it the same NIC as in the old PC or a different one?

[baldy]

Check the nic settings against the older PC. Perhaps his STB doesn't like 100/full duplex etc..

[th'engineer]

Check the nic settings against the older PC. Perhaps his STB doesn't like 100/full duplex etc..
I was wondering that as i had similar problems with a 4000 STB recently, are they known not to like new Pcs. his download was getting like dial up at one time. Unless its UBR probs, but that should have an effect on me as well

[Paul K]

4000 series can die on uploads and this will cause problems obviously. I swapped out to an older STB when mine played up and my speeds kept drifting off.

[th'engineer]

my thoughts exactly on this subject that the 4000 does not work at all well with newer PCs. He is also having probs with FTP

[Paul K]

Well when my 1000 was swapped out to a 4000 my upload would die to a crawl and then go altogether, this of course affected downloads too. If the STB is not behaving then maybe a phone call to CS is needed.

[Ignition]

Any ideas do you think it may be overdriving the 4000 STB he has working at higher speed

OK, take a step back and look at this logically...

The STB won't really care how fast the PC on the other end of the cable is, just what the network card on the other end is doing, regardless of how fast the PC is it's still the same baseband running @ 100MHz or 10MHz down a piece of cable.

Check network card and hard set the duplex and speed to 10baseT.

Do the usual checks to make sure PC is ok, AV checks, spyware checks, firewall configs, etc, etc.

At the end of the day the issue lies with the PC, STB is the same one that was running fine with the 500MHz machine, the issue is either with the network card / drivers, or a program on the PC generating traffic. Find the issue there and all should be sorted.

re: 'slowness' not v specific. Increased latency? Increased web page rendering times? Slower transfer rates on downloads?

Try using the excellent broadband speed tester to see if there are any differences between cached and uncached transfer rates (assuming caches are involved, don't think in Rochdale they are).

If there is no caching involved and the FTP probs persist check firewall configurations, and the remote site. Remember that the cable modem in the STB is a layer 2 and layer 1 device, it shouldn't really be making any difference to a layer 4 and above protocol such as FTP, and is it uploading that's the problem, this wasn't specified.

Hope this helps a bit and more info is always useful in diagnosis.

[th'engineer]

OK, take a step back and look at this logically...

The STB won't really care how fast the PC on the other end of the cable is, just what the network card on the other end is doing, regardless of how fast the PC is it's still the same baseband running @ 100MHz or 10MHz down a piece of cable.

Check network card and hard set the duplex and speed to 10baseT.

Do the usual checks to make sure PC is ok, AV checks, spyware checks, firewall configs, etc, etc.

At the end of the day the issue lies with the PC, STB is the same one that was running fine with the 500MHz machine, the issue is either with the network card / drivers, or a program on the PC generating traffic. Find the issue there and all should be sorted.

re: 'slowness' not v specific. Increased latency? Increased web page rendering times? Slower transfer rates on downloads?

Try using the excellent broadband speed tester to see if there are any differences between cached and uncached transfer rates (assuming caches are involved, don't think in Rochdale they are).

If there is no caching involved and the FTP probs persist check firewall configurations, and the remote site. Remember that the cable modem in the STB is a layer 2 and layer 1 device, it shouldn't really be making any difference to a layer 4 and above protocol such as FTP, and is it uploading that's the problem, this wasn't specified.

Hope this helps a bit and more info is always useful in diagnosis.Update so far checked the PC on my connection and vice versa loaned one of my PCs to test the connection.

Could be the NIC am going to try that putting a separate one in the PCI slot. The software used is configured exactly as the old machine only difference being more RAM and faster processor on the new machine.

Will check its set to 10 base as said allreaady works no problems on my STB through my router.

The slowness is on downloads checked with robins site it was down to 25 and up to 89.

The Software side brand new PC running XP virus and spyware checked none running in the background.

I will try some more monitoring on the connection.

Will update the details on my monitoring of it

[Ignition]

Could be the NIC am going to try that putting a separate one in the PCI slot. The software used is configured exactly as the old machine only difference being more RAM and faster processor on the new machine.


Famous last words ;) The only exactly the same config is a straight and direct disk mirroring.


Will check its set to 10 base as said allreaady works no problems on my STB through my router.


Doesn't really prove that much besides that the network card in the PC can autonegotiate OK with your router - best to hard set to eliminate another part of the puzzle.

Did your PC perform OK on the STB? If not might be worth looking at, so long as you changed the cables along with trying your PC. Something else worth looking at.

Once PC, network card, cable, etc, have been eliminated then STB is most likely cause, bizarre that it should go wrong from having a different PC plugged into it + I'd be inclined to check the bit that changed lots before pointing finger at the bit that worked fine until this new piece of kit was added.

[th'engineer]

Famous last words ;) The only exactly the same config is a straight and direct disk mirroring.



Doesn't really prove that much besides that the network card in the PC can autonegotiate OK with your router - best to hard set to eliminate another part of the puzzle.

Did your PC perform OK on the STB? If not might be worth looking at, so long as you changed the cables along with trying your PC. Something else worth looking at.

Once PC, network card, cable, etc, have been eliminated then STB is most likely cause, bizarre that it should go wrong from having a different PC plugged into it + I'd be inclined to check the bit that changed lots before pointing finger at the bit that worked fine until this new piece of kit was added.
Double checked last night no problems getting full download upload a bit flaky but it is a 4000 STB cant have everything .

Looks like a glitch that is now sorted, must have been a network problem at the time of testing