Laptop's download speed is considerably slower than it should be

[starsplash]

Hello.

Theoretically my Internet speed is 40/10, and in practice it means ~4,3 MB/s. But I have a Dell L702x laptop here which has odd speed problems. When I'm on WiFi and testing the speeds on Speedtest.net, I got the following speeds: download 32.72 Mb/s | upload 9.47 Mb/s (ping 9 ms). Which is somewhat good, but on my personal Asus laptop standing next to the Dell laptop, and choosing the exact same server for testing speeds, I got 37.52 Mb/s | 9.69 Mb/s (ping 10 ms). Ok, a few megabits here and there isn't that much of a deal, but there's more weird stuff.

Testing the speeds with a CAT 5e cable, I got the following results (I did the tests with the same cable and behind the same port on the router):
- Dell laptop: 9.50 Mb/s | 9.58 Mb/s
- Asus laptop: 34.49 Mb/s | 9.65 Mb/s

So comparing the Speedtest.net results on the Dell laptop between WiFi and wire, the download speed with wire is over three times slower (9.50 vs. 32.72). Also comparing to laptops' download speeds we can see, that Dell has over 3,5 times slower download speed over wire than Asus.


I understand that Speedtest.net results may not be the best way to compare the speeds, but it gives some sort of an indication. To test the speeds in a real situation, I downloaded an Ubuntu iso from the following link (http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/mirrors/releases.ubuntu.com/vivid/ubuntu-15.04-desktop-amd64.iso) on both laptops, using wire and WiFi. Here are the results:

Wired:
- Dell laptop: download speed rotated around 500-600 kB/s. Peaked at 750 kB/s for a while to drop again.
- Asus laptop: download speed was jumping between 4,0-4,3 MB/s. Most of the time it was 4,3 MB/s.


Wireless:
- Dell laptop: although Speedtest.net showed that wireless download speed is 32.72 Mb/s, in practice it was around 400-500 kB/s, although it managed to peak 1,0 MB/s-1,2 MB/s sometimes. But the average was probably around 500 kB/s.
- Asus laptop: download speed was pretty much the same as with wired - around 4 MB/s.


All of these speed differences made me think, what could be the source of the problem.
The router and the WiFi AP was the same in all scenarios;
the cable and the port behind the router was the same;
the Speedtest.net server was the same;
the Ubuntu FTP server was the same.


The Dell laptop should also get the same download speeds as the Asus laptop, but somehow it doesn't. I was wondering maybe it's a Windows 7 issue or a faulty driver issue, but booted a Linux CD and fired up wget from the terminal and tried downloading something and the speed problems persisted, both wire and wireless.

I'm wondering what tests should I perform, in order to get the cause of the problem. One option would be that the network adapters are messed up - are these replacable?

Well, that's all the description I could come up with. If there's anything confusing, ask me.

I'm grateful for all the help.

starsplash

 

[paul1149]

Other drivers that could affect it are for the chipset, or for the graphics adapter if there is no separate chipset driver, and the BIOS itself. But the problem doesn't seem to be entirely consistent, at least with the wifi. You might also clean the RAM, and make sure the laptop is at decent operating temps.

 

[GokAy]

You can check the advanced tab of device properties for the wired network card. See if Speed & Duplex is not set to 10 Mbps, try 100 Full Duplex for example if it is Auto Negotiate.