Peter’s blog

Tonight I popped by my cousin’s place to check out his ADSL connection. He has been complaining that even though it is a 1.5Mbit service, he only achieves a download rate of about 10 KB/sec. He is running Windows XP SP2 on a 800MHz Pentium III with about 512MB of RAM.

Since I hate Windows I brought my trusty Knoppix CD with me and booted the system into Linux. Downloading a few large files from work gave an average download speed of 155 KB/sec. Nothing wrong with that connection, just the operating system holding it back.

I left my cousin scratching his head and pondering an operating system switch.

UPDATE: 2 June 2005. My cousin switched to an iMac G5 and now the internet runs at full speed, plus his kids reckon “This is the best computer we’ve ever had”