Differing broadband connections speed from pc & la

Confused here... I have a brand new laptop & a 5 year old P4 PC. Both are connected to the same wireless O2 box But both give widely differing results from the speedtest here. I ould have thought that the speed test measured the speed of delivery to the unit - any suggestions to the disparity of results ( New laptop giving a 4mb & the PC gving a 200kb reaing for upstream.

You probably need to tweak MTU etc settings. What operating systems are involved?

The PC is running Windows XP Home & the Laptop is running Vista Home premium. Afraid I dont know what you mean by MTU settings..

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

The PC is running Windows XP Home & the Laptop is running Vista Home premium. Afraid I dont know what you mean by MTU settings..

the PC gving a 200kb reaing for upstream

Don't you mean downstream?

Anyway - to the PC download TCPOptimizer. Let it do its thing automatically, but take the option to save the current settings in case you need to go back. (Unlikely!).

Do NOT use TCPOptimizer on the Vista laptop - Vista has its own tuning so you could mess that up.

MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) specifies the size of packets over networks. If two parts of the network have different MTUs then packets keep getting split up and that slows things.

Also relevant is RWIN - that's the size of the Received Buffer in Windows, so again if stuff is coming down faster that your computer empties the buffer everything stops. So a bigger buffer is usually a good idea.

TCPOptimizer sets both.