Like others have said, your hardware is capable of more speed than you're getting.

I'm willing to bet both these system are running mechanical hard drives? I'm asking this because I have upgraded many older systems to SSD's giving them a new lease of life, my game server has a lower spec to your main CPU wise but is capable of downloading at over 60MB/s when downloading from Steam. I think full gigabit speed is pushing it though imho.

Your CPU/RAM/NIC are all capable of higher speed.

Having multiple backups is a good thing, especially so if you have important data. Myself, I have drives in a RAID setup to help prevent data loss if a drive fails and I also backup regularly overnight to an off-site server using Duplicacy.

As others have said, it could be your 'security software' that's causing a slowdown. I can't comment on AVG Internet Security as I use something else, although primarily that looks for viruses and malware instead of also acting as a firewall or whatever else some of the security software out there does in addition.

On the main page of TTB there is a link to download files - try downloading one of these and monitoring the data download rate using task manager and see if it is higher (this takes out the main processor intensive tasks of speed tests). Be interesting to see if you can get over 120Mb/s doing that.

Well:
Pheasant, I used the TB Speedtest and the Open Speed Test within a minute of each other and got 267 Mbps and 334 Mbps a big difference.
Redayejedi. Both my drive C:'s are SSDs
ian72 I downloaded the very large test file and monitored it with Task Manager as you suggested. Briefly, it touched 302 Mbps

I am no wiser!

I'm on Virgin Media 1 gigabit. With any web based speedtester it maxes out my CPU so I never see anywhere near 1 gig throughput.

If I use a native Windows app or a command line app, such as the ookla ones on speedtest.net, then I see 900+ mbps.

https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/d/8d87ddd2-1379-...

Good point.

The OP started out with a simple question that has now evolved into a bit of a forensic diagnostic search for the cause (as these things inevitably tend to go). There are a couple of facets to this, to my mind anyway:

- speed test results are not a consistent beast. Rather than focussing on individual figures, it is preferable to look at a 'basket' of speed tests from various servers and also various speed test tools and at various times to get a broader view of performance. The law of averages.

- speed testing is all rather pointless and 'artificial' - it is rare to be running a high-speed domestic broadband connection consistently flat out. There are other factors that are just as if not more important, such as performance variation at different times/days, how much latency and jitter is present at 'idle' as well as when loaded, are there buffer-bloat issues, etc.

- to your point, the nature of the speed test itself, stresses not only the network but the host hardware - something perhaps OP may not have appreciated previously. As you say web-based speed tests are far more resource hungry than other forms of tests such as native or command line. Therefore how closely does the testing tool match reality? Answer, not always very close at all.

- content comes from all over, and isn't always readily available from the nearest CDN or cache, therefore the real world performace may be just a fraction of what a headline Speedtest suggests is possible.

- no matter how much 'we' collectively deny it, we are in some thrall of our speed test results (and ping times!)

If your laptop is old, then the ethernet will be Fast Ethernet: 100 Mbps max, on the laptop.
Also wifi will always be less than optimal.

In reply to a post by jet14:

If your laptop is old, then the ethernet will be Fast Ethernet: 100 Mbps max, on the laptop.
Also wifi will always be less than optimal.

How does one get 267 and 334 Mbps from a Fast Ethernet port? 🙃

In reply to a post by jet14:

If your laptop is old, then the ethernet will be Fast Ethernet: 100 Mbps max, on the laptop. Also wifi will always be less than optimal.

Not always the case, my old Thinkpad T40 had a gigabit Ethernet port. The WiFi was only 802.11b so back at the start of WiFi around 2003.

Gigabit Ethernet has been around a LONG time. Some retail brands fitted 100 Mbps to save money, not for any other reason.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

How does one get 267 and 334 Mbps from a Fast Ethernet port? 🙃

Broken AV software causing caching effects and breaking a web based speed test? I've seen some AV product convince a person was getting 8 Gigabit from their ADSL internet