I've been doing some work on the side for a family friend on some of his systems. He asked me to come look at some stuff, while I was there was like this system has slow speed test results, said the rest showed 100meg. He didn't show me what another looked like though, this got to about 40 meg on test. He was concerned maybe malware in background doing something. I ran the AV he had, and ran a current scan with avast and malware bytes, they found nothing.

I took system back, he said it wasn't much better. I had told him those sites aren't always going to be real accurate due to usage on the testing server, etc. Also some ISPs find traffic like that and will give it special QOS, some you get 100 meg, or what ever you buy even though you may not see that really. I also noticed that between IE and chrome there is like 2-8meg difference.

I looked at the network part was cat5e, he said other systems he's setup on that cable have done fine, so it's not network. 10/100 integrated NIC, all the settings for speed, duplex were auto. I had thought, and he asked could it be the interface. I can't imagine it would be usually NICs work or fail totally so I have doubts on that. I got dr.tcp and enabled path mtu discovery.

I saw the difference IE and chrome had, (chrome better) that almost tells me it's software. I looked at all the network stuff, appeared OK, so I'm wondering if these sites use java or active-x or something that may need update. It looked like he was up to date at least with windows, was set for auto, most other things unless you say are auto update too.

Any ideas, other than maybe check adobe, etc. 3rd party stuff to see if it's current. I ran common regular maintenance too on it defrag, etc. All the settings I checked at home, but they were all for auto, so should do same there. Network sounds fine so it's not like an issue on the switch.

Thanks

 

Good question. My XP machines are much, much slower than my win 7 machine, so I'll be watching to see if anything helpful pops up. Please keep us up to date.

Sorry I couldn't help, but I admire the issue.

 

I looked at again, I tried using Linux lice cd, but it needs flash for test site, so I couldn't do anything other than a ping to google, I got 38MS on cd, on xp sytem I got about 32ms.
I tried using AVG pc tune up trail, it fixed a few registry things, etc no difference. I verified the settings, and everything was up to date. I worked on for probably another hour, and then was like it's xp your going to have to go to 7 anyways. appears he wants to keep xp on a few systems I think due to old devices, wants me to make 2 networks, an internal for the xp stuff and an internet access one. I don't know when he'll have me do that, but he has to buy a 2nd switch, then i'll have to map the network because nothing was labeled.

 

I looked at again, I tried using Linux lice cd, but it needs flash for test site, so I couldn't do anything other than a ping to google...

http://www.speedtest.net/ will run under linux. You may need to run:

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer

at the command line first.

The NIC could also be bad. Running under linux will help you figure that out.

 

I didn't think you could install anything being a live cd, I thought they only got read access to local HDD, and wasn't sure where it would even install to.

 

I didn't think you could install anything being a live cd, I thought they only got read access to local HDD, and wasn't sure where it would even install to.

The LiveCDs sets up a ram disk...linux sees it as a regular hard drive, albeit with limited space. The installation will disappear upon the next reboot.

This will *not* work with packages that require a reboot after installing (i.e. video driver).

 

My recently expired XP computer could do 10 Mb/S. I tested it to see if I was getting the advertised rate from my ISP. It worked. In fact, there were moments a lot faster before my ISP noticed what was going on and throttled my speed down to what I paid for.

However, I let the XP die because it couldn't keep up with video streaming. I now have (2) Vista computers, a dual core and a quad core, and they are fast enough (in the hardware) to do anything I want.

 

...I now have (2) Vista computers, a dual core and a quad core, and they are fast enough (in the hardware) to do anything I want.

Have you tried a SSD drive yet, #12? Blazingly fast!

 

No. Something about a limit to the number of read/write operations before they fail. Has that been fixed?

 

No. Something about a limit to the number of read/write operation before they fail. Has that been fixed?

From the website of a drive that I just installed:

Life Expectancy -- 1.2 million hours mean time to failure (MTTF)

Endurance -- 72TB total bytes written (TBW), equal to 40GB per day for 5 years

This is for a Crucial M500 250GB drive.

 

have you set the cacheing yet? if you let windows do it for you, it will be going on and off hard disk to memory and back used to be a problem when people put in more memory, would do virtual caching more from the memory to the hard drive.

 

WindowsXP has had a limit purposely introduced with service pack 2. Have a look here for fix http://half-open.com/

 

Good question. My XP machines are much, much slower than my win 7 machine, so I'll be watching to see if anything helpful pops up. Please keep us up to date. . .

. . . Any ideas, other than maybe check adobe, etc. 3rd party stuff to see if it's current. I ran common regular maintenance too on it defrag, etc. All the settings I checked at home, but they were all for auto, so should do same there. Network sounds fine so it's not like an issue on the switch.

Thanks

I'm going to assume this installation of XP has all the latest service packs, etc. I've never had a problem with my XP machines being a great deal slower then my Vista or 7 based computers. The few times I have had issues it turned out to be a software issue or the NIC/LAN adapter. There are some hardware things thing you can try - like the obvious; try a different RJ-45 cable, or install updated drivers.

If those suggestions fail and the interface still exhibits issues, go into device manager and "delete" the device from the system. Reboot the computer, and let XP find the "new" hardware and install drivers for it (or install the driver yourself manually). Doing this will sometimes cause a balky NIC to get itself squared away. Often malware or just a corrupted driver can cause a network interface (be it onboard or add-on card) to do some strange things . . . seems some bad settings get stuck or locked, and totally "deleting" the device is the only way to clear things.

Also, an NIC can be physically damaged and still work somewhat. I can't count the systems I've had to install a network interface card in to replace a gimpy onboard NIC.