I have searched the web and the forums here and I can't get a concrete answer to this - anybody have any ideas?
I recently started doing support for a company and they said several of their computers were VERY slow on the Internet - I did some tests (speakeasy.net/speedtest) and several of them were indeed very slow. Different motherboards, different NICS, there didn't seem to be any one piece of hardware that might cause it. So I reformatted a computer and it worked fine using Windows XP Pro (no service packs, and older version of XP) - blazing Internet speeds, reported 1.5 MBPS on a T1 connection - just as it should. I installed Office XP pro - worked like a charm, no effect on Internet. I started doing updates - Internet continued to work fine. Then I installed SP2 and WHAM! - the Internet speeds dropped to about 384 KBSP. WHAT is in SP2 that caused this? How do I get around it? I would have thought it was something to do with the NIC, but this occurs on three different computers, each with a different NIC. Here's the REAL kicker - on one of the computers I replaced the NIC 3 times, each time with a brand new and different brand name NIC (the original NIC was an intel pro 100s, then replaced with a Linksys, then a Netgear) - no effect. Then I plugged in a Netgear USB NIC - and voila - the Internet speed was back! Whassup with that?
Thanks
I recently started doing support for a company and they said several of their computers were VERY slow on the Internet - I did some tests (speakeasy.net/speedtest) and several of them were indeed very slow. Different motherboards, different NICS, there didn't seem to be any one piece of hardware that might cause it. So I reformatted a computer and it worked fine using Windows XP Pro (no service packs, and older version of XP) - blazing Internet speeds, reported 1.5 MBPS on a T1 connection - just as it should. I installed Office XP pro - worked like a charm, no effect on Internet. I started doing updates - Internet continued to work fine. Then I installed SP2 and WHAM! - the Internet speeds dropped to about 384 KBSP. WHAT is in SP2 that caused this? How do I get around it? I would have thought it was something to do with the NIC, but this occurs on three different computers, each with a different NIC. Here's the REAL kicker - on one of the computers I replaced the NIC 3 times, each time with a brand new and different brand name NIC (the original NIC was an intel pro 100s, then replaced with a Linksys, then a Netgear) - no effect. Then I plugged in a Netgear USB NIC - and voila - the Internet speed was back! Whassup with that?
Thanks