Testing broadband speed?

dartsfan

Hi,

I'm looking for an effective way to test out my broadband speed as I'm suspicious that there is a virus or malware on my PC that is interfering with it. At the moment, I'm set up with a firewall and have performed virus and spyware checks on this PC that have produced no results.
What I was hoping to do was perform a test on my PC that is connected directly to the router and then perform an identical test on my laptop that is connected wirelessly to this router. If both are in and around the same response times then I'd imagine the PC is clean.
Ideally I'd like to perform a browser based test. Can someone advise me of a good test to run to check out this scenario?
Thanks!

pwd

speedtest.net will give an indication of your speed.

However for your situation I'd suggest you use netstat.
This will show you a list of all the connections to the internet on your machine, and it can identify the executable that created them also.
To run it, open the command prompt as an administrator. Then type netstat -b. The -b argument tells it to list the names of the executables involved in each connection.

If this doesn't give you all the information you need, or if you aren't satisfied with the reports, you can also use a program called fiddler. This is free/spyware free and available for download. This will list all the data transmitted over tcp connections on your computer, and allow you to inspect the content of the data. It is generally used to debug web applications, however it would also show you any transmissions that shouldn't be there.

dartsfan

Thanks for that. I've tried out netstat and the only process reported was my browser (chrome.exe). Would it be possible for a malicious process to "hide" itself within that?

Also, I've looked at speedtest and I'm wondering if this would highlight any such problems seeing as it's a one off test?

pwd

Look at the urls in the netstat report by using -f argument to give fully qualified domain names. It should show you if it's connecting anywhere it shouldn't be.

If you want more than one-off tests, you need to use fiddler. You can leave that running in the background and it will record all tcp transactions in detail.

I think your problem is more likely to be due to an issue with your service provider though.

crawler

Have you tried spybot search and destroy?

http://www.safer-networking.org/index2.html

also make sure you are not seeding torrents.

best test I can tihnk of for pure bandwidth availability is an FTP transfer to and from HEAnet.

dartsfan

Yes, have tried Spybot Search and Destroy. Haven't really noticed this as much since I removed Firefox and started using Chrome....perhaps it was a problem with Firefox itself.