Old pc affect FTTC speeds?

Good day everyone. This may seem like a silly question...I am looking at getting fibre broadband, probably Infinity, in the next few months. My pc is pretty old, about seven years old and runs Windows xp. Is there any chance that my old pc will affect the FTTC speed I get, especially during the initial installation period? Looking at a new pc around September. Thanks for listening.

The PC will NOT affect the speed received. And provided your Ethernet card is 100Mb then you should get full speed to the PC. If the PC has an 802.11b wireless interface, whilst your hub will be able to receive full speed the link to the PC will be limited.

I have a 6 year old XP laptop which is perfectly capable of getting 1Gbps on the network ... so don't worry about yours.

MHC - thanks for the response. Much obliged. It's just that I had read some posts where people were saying their speed test results were lower with an older pc than a newer one. My concern was that the line would sync at a lower speed than it's capable of because of the computer. Didn't want my new pc suffering with a slower connection because of the old one!

In reply to a post by giggsy1977:

My concern was that the line would sync at a lower speed than it's capable of because of the computer.

Don't worry, that won't happen. The BT Openreach modem manages the connection speed (along with the equipment in the local cabinet). Your computer has nothing to do with the line connection speed.

MHC and Ade - thanks for your replies, you've put my mind at ease! Just waiting to see how much aluminum there is in the cables now! Hopefully not much! Only 350m from cabinet, but currently only get 1.5m at the moment!

A PC cannot affect the sync speed, where an old PC can struggle is running flash and java at say 80 Mbps, or if streaming say a 10 Mbps HD video stream and the video card cannot render the frames, but this has no bearing on the sync speeds.

Mr Saffron - nice name btw! Thanks for further clarification. Can start looking forward to it now! Esp when got new pc hooked up to it - current one is very slow.

I might be a bit late with my answer, but I upgraded yesterday to FTTC provided by Plusnet. My old line provided about 1.8Mbs and my new line tested as suitable up to 96Mbs (or something in that region!). The changeover went well but my laptop (XP) achived 7Mbs (speedtest.net) which was fantastic, but a little below expectation! I tried other family laptops and they were all at 20Mbs plus.... Mine used XP pro and the others used Win 7, so I researched the issue further.
I found a reference which indicated XP didn't cope well with optimising wifi parameters for higher speeds and a program TCPOptimiser was recommended to configure XP.
I was a little dubious, but further searching did not indicate any concerns, so it was installed and set to 'optimise'. Finger crossed.....
Well I now have 24Mbs dn 1.5Mbs up.
I have no connection with the program designers/manufaters etc., and there may be others to examine, but it did seem to work, so an 'old' PC may affect what you can achieve via the wifi.

Let us know what speeds you get with your fttc.

With a connection capable of 96Mbps, 24 is well below expectations.

If you are on a 40Mbps connection then I would expect to see a minimum of 35Mbps and with an 80Mbps connection, the high 70's.

I use an old XP laptop and can it easily deals with 100Mbps where available - last year I had access to a profile 30 connection which gave test results of over 90Mbps.

You need to investigate why your connection speed is so low.


And by the way the abbreviation for te speed is either Mbps or Mb/s NOT Mbs.

Wireless is your problem not the age of your PC. And neither are concerned with the sync speed which is determined entirely by your
router independent of all your devices.

You should check your wireless channel is separated from your neighbours' using inSSIDer

Mbs is a measure of the life expectancy of a bit

Yes, you are correct and that was the point I tried (badly) to make, that XP apparently has issues so your speed measured by the speedtesters will be possibly be limited by your (old) system.
But as clearly mentioned in other posts it does not affect the FTTC delivered.

Regarding Wireless, I had checked channels and all networks found were 1 or 10 so mine was set at 5.

Interesting I did some test last night with only one laptop at a time being used and each achieved around 23Mbps.

This morning I did a wired connection test and achieved 36199 Kbps dn and 1665 Kbps up, so again this points to a wireless issue.

Thanks for you comments

Yes I'm on 40Mbps connection.

I just did some tests with the network cable to the router and get 36199 Kbps and 1665 Kbps so guess my 24Mbps Wireless performance is a wireless issue.

Thanks for your comments.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results/id/1...

I originally missed the point about wireless - using a SmartPhone at the time.

So, sort out a new wireless card for the PC or use it wired! Those speeds are what I would expect to see.

Also, if you use DrTCP you can set different MTUs for wired and wireless to optimise both.

On a BT provided VDSL for a wired connection MTU should be set to 1492 and maybe 1470-1478 for wireless although some experimentation is needed to find the best.

Edited by MHC (Wed 27-Jun-12 10:21:34)