Different speeds on wired desktop and wireless modem

[philco]

Hello,

A few days ago I upgraded from the 4mb service to the 20mb service - and so far so good.

I have a SURFboard4100 cable modem which goes to a Netgear Router. From the router I go to the desktop by cable and wirefree to my laptop.

One thing I've noticed through running several speed tests (www.speedtest.net) is that (with figs approx):

The best my (wired) desktop pc can manage is about 1.33MB

My laptop (wirefree) consistently manages 2.0MB.

I've done the tests at various times of day/evening and the results are always the same.

The desktop pc is using Windows XP Home Edition the laptop is using Vista.

The laptop and the desktop are both running Zone Alarm pro with identical settings.

I've taken the cable from the back of the desktop and plugged it into the laptop and run a speedtest and it still shows about 2MB. That says to me that somewhere my desktop pc is dragging down performance.

I've done the tweaks recommended on the VM site. Auto detect is much better than full or half duplex and unchecking QOS brought about a very small improvement in speed. (I haven't actually unistalled QOS, just unchecked it.)

Obviously there are significant hardware difference but both are running Intel Core 2 Duo processors with 2GB of RAM.

Any ideas anybody.

philco

[MovedGoalPosts]

Do both computers have the same antivirus software? Is one scanning stuff at a higher rate than the other?

Do you have current drivers for the wired network card, and indeed all parts of the wired PC?

Assuming that there are no hardware faults it must be something with the wired PC's configuration, or perhaps Vista (for a rare change) is actually better.

[philco]

Hello Rob,

Do you know I thought about updating the network card driver and decided not to bother as I thought the PC is fairly new anyway ... well 15 months old actually!!

I've just done it and on a couple of tests a minute or so apart it has gone from 1.33MB to 1.6MB.

Tks for that matey. Any other good tips like that one would be mucho appreciated. Or like you say, p'raps it's Vista doing something well.

See ya,

Phil

---------- Post added at 15:44 ---------- Previous post was at 15:05 ----------

Rob,

I forgot to say that both are running the virus and spyware checkers that come with ZA Pro. The laptop is also running Windows Defender but I'm not sure that will drag it down.

What other parts of the desktop do you think I should check for updated drivers? None of them seem really relevant to 'performance' other than the network card.

See ya,

Phil