problem connection

pjproby

friend has upc bb, 3mbs down, but is consistently getting half that speed-I plugged my laptop in and the speed was close enough to 3mbs,
His anti virus checker is up to date and the network driver says it is also the latest version.
Any idea what might be causing the problem?
any suggestions much appreciated.

vibe666

i know you said you plugged your own laptop in, so i'm assuming an ethernet connection, but is he using it wirelessly or via an ethernet cable too?

how are you testing the speed?

if you're using speedtest.net on both and seeing different results, he may just need a good spring clean on his PC, or if it's old enough it may just not be up to the job.

what spec is the PC he's using? how fast is the CPU and memory? what operating system is on it, Windows XP or Vista maybe?

if it's reasonably specced then a good spring clean might be in order. spybot s&d and ad-aware (free) are a good place to start, but others may suggest other spyware tools, i don't use windows much these days outside of work and thats mostly servers so my anti-spyware skills are probably a little out of date these days if i'm honest.

don't just google for anti-spyware tools though, a lot of the results you'll find *could* lead you to fake tools written by the bad guys to propagate the very stuff they claim to rid you of, so take a few recommendations and use those. spybot and adaware would be a good starting point though, they'll usually clean out most of the stuff that anti-virus may miss.

make sure he has a decent amount of free disk space (at least 15% free) by emptying temp folders and run a defrag to see if that might be a contributing factor too.

clean out his temporary internet files too as that can cause problems over time if left unchecked.

if you're unsure how to do any of this, there are many articles that you will find via google giving more details if you search for spring cleaning your pc by cleaning out junk files etc. just be wary of anything that tries to get you to download something unless you've verified that it's legit.

hope that helps a bit, but it's past my bedtime and I need my beauty sleep.

pjproby

VIBE666
thanks for your reply, i really appreciate it. I will have another go at it.