Internet question

Answers to a few questions might help...

Downloading via the Web, via FTP, via SCP, ???

What programs are you using to do the downloading (inside of VPC, and in Panther)?

Did you have the VPC session running when you tested the Panther download speed?

 

Keep in mind that your going to run into Slow/Busy servers which can't always give full bandwidth, for me my PC and Mac will have about the same speed but I do find some places faster then others

I don't think Panther should be doing anything to slow your connection so I should guess thats its just a question of how good the server is on the other side

 

Sounds a little fishy to me. With a 256 Kb/s connection to your provider, the most I would expect you to get would be 256/8 or 32 KB/s, so getting 60 "kb" which I am assuming is kilobytes (KB) not kilobits (Kb) would seem to be impossible. And getting 20-24 KB per second on the Mac, or about 75% of maximum, isn't too bad.

That being said, the best way to test this would be to time a download of the exact same file from the exact same site. Can't really do it at the same time, as that would impact both downloads, but you could do it one right after the other, then compare actual download times, not what the browser might be telling you. And make sure it is a relatively large file, a megabyte or more, so that there is enough time to really tell.

 

Well the site you downloaded the windows file might have a better connection, so you will download faster. The best thing to do is to download a big file (5-8 MB) and see what you get both from panther and VPC.

It depends, I have a 1MB line to my house and i some days have very fast connection and other days its very slow. Depends on the sites/servers you are connecting to.

 

if you're downloading from the microsoft site its possible you'll get better dl on windows. microsoft probably makes the site so its optimised for windows and IE. for example using asp instead of html or whatever. i found asp isn't as fast on a mac. but if the site uses standard stuff, loads are a lot faster on a mac than on windows.