[SOLVED] What component in my laptop besides network card could affect internet speed?

[bgillette]

Hi,
I was wondering if anyone might know if something other than the network card in a laptop could affect the internet download speed? I am having an odd issue that i have never seen before with a new laptop i just got. When i use various internet speed test online from the laptop i am getting about 25% of the connection speed i have contracted for with my ISP.

It is only happening on this one Acer Aspire 3 laptop. I have 3 other desktop machines and 8 laptops at home and 3 different wifi routers. No combination of those machines and the 3 routers produce slow results like this. they all test out fairly close to my max ISP speed when i use the online internet speed tests.

I have tried testing the speed of the internet connection while connected to my router by a wifi (5g) 433Mbps link speed connection, and a hardwired cat6 ethernet connection with a 1Gb link speed. same results. 2 laptops side by side, accesing my network the same way (tried 5g wifi on both and ethernet on both) over the same router ...on the new acer aspire
3 i get about a 50Mbps download rate (acording to Ookla Speedtest & other online internet speed tests) and with my dell inspiron (and pretty much all other computer in my home) , i get around a 198Mbps download rate over a 200Mbps ISP connection from comcast.

I thought the new Acer Aspire 3 might have a crappy wifi card in it (but that wouldn't explain the slow speed over ethernet) so i plugged in a usb 5G wifi card and tried it with that. similar results.

The Acer ASpire 3 has the AMD a9-9425 cpu and has 6GB memory, running windows 10 home. and has the realtec rtl8168/8111 PCI-E gigabit enternet nic and an Atheros/Qualcomm QCA9377 80211.ac Wifi network adapter.
My isp is comcast and i have 200+Mbps contracted speed with them for my internet.

Is there some component on the laptop that could be causing the slow download rate, other than the network cards? The cpu doesn't seem to be slow or under powered in any way.

 

[bill001g]

I can be a bunch of different things unfortunately . Commonly it is disk related but it can also be stuff like virus scans or other software. Resource monitor might give you a clue if for example you see 100% cpu load.

To eliminate the network you can run a old program called IPERF. You want to test this on ethernet between 2 of your machines. Do not use wifi it can impact the result too much.

You should see 900mbps or more in both direction between your machines.

This program is extremely small. It tests only the network and the network drivers. It is not much affected by cpu/memory/disk

If you get really desperate you boot a unix image that allows you to test without impacting your os install. You want to run it from a fast USB3 stick if you can since any file download will go there rather than a internal SSD.

This should show if it is some hardware issue or it is some crap software on your machine or maybe some windows setting.

 

[bgillette]

I can be a bunch of different things unfortunately . Commonly it is disk related but it can also be stuff like virus scans or other software. Resource monitor might give you a clue if for example you see 100% cpu load.

To eliminate the network you can run a old program called IPERF. You want to test this on ethernet between 2 of your machines. Do not use wifi it can impact the result too much.

You should see 900mbps or more in both direction between your machines.

This program is extremely small. It tests only the network and the network drivers. It is not much affected by cpu/memory/disk

If you get really desperate you boot a unix image that allows you to test without impacting your os install. You want to run it from a fast USB3 stick if you can since any file download will go there rather than a internal SSD.

This should show if it is some hardware issue or it is some crap software on your machine or maybe some windows setting.

Thanks for he suggestion!. i ran iperf and it was only showing about 30Mbps.
so i did what you suggested and boot from an Ubuntu/Linux usb and ran the same speed tests.
Everything is NORMAL, with expected speeds when doing that. So its not an issue with the network cards it seems. something running on windows 10 home itself it would seem. Now i just have to figure out what.

 

[bill001g]

If iperf show issues but linux does not it likely is a driver issue. Iperf is not affected by the OS itself much....it might be if there is something like a "gamer" network accelerator.

Gets tricky to get drivers for laptop sometimes. Make sure windows did not update them and put in the generic ones.

Tonight I am forgetting everything. People have change some tcp optimization thing that affects this. Seems a windows patch change it to something other than default. I forget the exact setting. I think it was autotune but I just don't remember.