[profro]

I bought my wife a new laptop: Toshiba Satellite with 1 G ram and Centrino Duo processor.

It ran much, much slower than my 512 Mb ram version of the same Satellite running with XP.

I have talked with lots of folks at Compusa and Best Buy and each has offered their advice to speed the computer up.

So far we have:

turned off all the fancy Vista 3D stuff
kept the brower cache to around 50 Mb
have the "virtual memory" set at the suggested amount
upgraded the RAM to 2 Gb
switched to Firefox Mozilla
defragged the hard drive

Yet, when still compared to my 512 XP over the same wireless router in a side-by-side test, the Vista computer browses, downloads, and uploads files via the internet RE MARKEDLY slower.

What gives?

 

[Kornphlake]

it could be in the network settings on the new laptop. It's been a long time since I tweaked the settings for my computer but somewhere in the options you can fine tune some of the settings for how the computer connects to the network. Make the settings identical for both computers and run the same test again.

 

[syadasti]

Try updating the wireless drivers or the router firmware. I fixed someone's Core Duo iMac and it was the built in Wifi that was causing the problems - the machine worked fine over Ethernet. I think was a Broadcom Wifi chipset on the iMac - probably the same one Toshiba uses. The problem is the Broadcom was not adhering as closely to the 802.11 b/g standard as they should.

 

[profro]

Okay, I updated the router firmware and the problem still exists. My old XP computer is still fast, but the wireless connection through Vista is still slow, slow, slow. I have checked the wireless drivers and all seems up-to-date. I can connect the Vista directly with a LAN cable and its as fast as my XP machine. What gives?

 

[syadasti]

Okay, I updated the router firmware and the problem still exists. My old XP computer is still fast, but the wireless connection through Vista is still slow, slow, slow. I have checked the wireless drivers and all seems up-to-date. I can connect the Vista directly with a LAN cable and its as fast as my XP machine. What gives?

Sounds like its the wifi/chipset drivers or hardware - I bet its Broadcom too

On the iMac the thing was super slow over wifi until I updated the drivers via the auto update and it worked great. Later Apple released another update and its back to dog slow but the user didn't really need wifi since his router was right next to his computer - ethernet was fine and he didn't want to spend money on me fixing it for him. I think if he switched to Apple router he'd have no issues since there seems to be some fudging of standards going on - Applecare would not fix it on the phone with him because he was using a non-Apple router - a Verizon Fios Dlink freebie. Possibly a different router - maybe with a broadcom chipset (or whomever makes your WiFi chipset) would fix your problem too...

You can also try switch WiFi modes on the router - ie 802.11 b or g only (depending on your equipment) or try WEP vs WPA or even no encryption if you don't think anyone is close enough to get on your Wifi.