Download speeds Vs. 'puter speed?

[Lightning McQueen]

Are pc download speeds over broadband related to pc speed, operating system settings or something else?

A few of us at work have been discussing the recent speed upgrade of the local cable network, everyone has different download speeds, some were getting 1.8Mbps, others well in excess of 6.5Mbps.

As I have several pc's connected to the network at home I carried out a simple experiment.

Each pc in turn downloaded a 13.3MB file from download.com, twice.

1700xp xp pro ............. 29 sec, 28 sec


700 Duron xp home ...... 42 sec, 37 sec


PII 300 (laptop) 98se .... 4 min 23 sec, yes, I know, its pathetic 3 min 56 sec, also pants


I am at a loss to explain the results, on the face of it it would appear that faster pc speed is responsible for the faster download speeds, but is operating system having an effect here, maybe?

What do the techies here reckon?

 

[WinstonSmith]

I'd noticed the same thing on mine - the slower PC running windows 2000 consistently downloads slower than the faster PC running XP. I'd be interested to hear an explanation too.

 

[zambuck]

I am no techie either but I understand that computer processing speed does help with the 'broadband' speed in the sense that the faster computer can process activity and packets faster when connected to LAN...

On the bottom right hand side of your screen you will see Local Area Connection icon....double click that and you will see the acticity of packets...

Regarding various speeds on broadband it is all due the distance of the exchange and 'contention ratio' as well.....

I have checked the sppeds and various times and it has varied greatly...

My friends also get anything from 1.8 to 8.0....and we are all on the same supplier and almost in the same locality..

See link below....

http://resources.zdnet.co.uk/speedtest/

 

[Priceman]

There are just so many variables to this... what time of the day is it? If the USA is coming online then that can affect your downloads (particularly if it's from a US site that you're downloading) How big your ISP/ supplier's pipe is (so to speak :cheesy: ). How many subscribers they have on their servers... it goes on and on

I'm sure there will be a million different reasons given which could all be valid

 

[roguetrader]

I'm no techie either, but from what I have picked up here and there, I'd say that by and large OS and processer have little or nothing to do with your download speed (excluding extremes of course). As Priceman says there are a huge number of variables that can affect download speed.

A really simple example is that on occasion when I have been downloading a large file and found myself with a very slow speed, I have simply cancelled the download and immediately attempted to download from scratch again, same source, no change to a different mirror or anything like that, and the difference can be double the speed, clearly nothing has changed at my end so some other variable must have changed in between.
I have an old Thinkpad running Win2k and a 850 Mhz PIII, and a couple of XP machines running much faster processers, even a core2duo, and the fastest download speeds have been similar on all machines.