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One of my WinXP computers is experiencing major slow downs when visiting a particular website but this problem doesn't exist on other computers on the same network. I think there's a problem in my network connection between my computer and my router.

Is there a utility that i can freely use to test my network connection?

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  • How big is your network?
    – Josh K
    Oct 9, 2009 at 0:53
  • If it is just for a particular website, it couldn't be related to the network unless you have fiddled with, for example, ad-blockers/firewall/anti-virus on this specific machine... no?
    – jldupont
    Oct 9, 2009 at 1:55
  • Possible duplicate. See this question: superuser.com/questions/8392/why-is-my-internet-so-slow
    – Josh Hunt
    Oct 9, 2009 at 4:06
  • This is not a Wireless LAN, correct?
    – foraidt
    Oct 9, 2009 at 8:16

5 Answers 5

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Boot up with a Live-CD and browse the same websites. If they load at the same speed as the other PC's, then you can rule out faulty hardware. It's always a good idea to rule out hardware as a first step, to avoid hitting your head against the wall in the end.

I can suggest Knoppix. Its a bit techie if you don't know it, but well worth learning IMHO, an indispensable tool for troubleshooting many issues.

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  • That's a good idea to use a "clean" set up. If Knoppix is tricky, Ubuntu is a more straightforward live CD. Oct 9, 2009 at 6:44
  • Ubuntu is a good option for live CD newbies. For completeness, two others I want to mention are "Network Security Toolkit" and "Backtrack", both with a wide range of network (and other) tools.
    – invert
    Oct 9, 2009 at 7:16
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You have multiple Windows XP machines on an internal network (same external IP address, I presume) and you find that one of these machines sees slower connections to one-specific external site.

If this is your exact description,
It is very likely a problem on this internal Windows XP machine.
It is unlikely to be a problem in your internal network -- because,
that should cause all connectivity to have problems.

To check your Internet connectivity in general, you could something like SpeedTest from this machine and one other that seems to work fine. But, if the problem is specifically with just one site, this would not show different results.

To verify that your internal network path is good you could 'ping' the router's internal address from this machine and one another that works fine -- to compare results.
You could also 'flood ping' to see continuity. But, again, since you are facing problems with a single site on this single internal machine, it is very likely a problem with the internal machine's software state.

To get deeper in such analysis (when you have run out of all configuration differences between this machine other working machines), you would want to take packet captures (Wireshark) on two machines while accessing the site in question and compare them to see what is going wrong with the problem machine.

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I'd run "tracert" if I were you, in order to find the bottleneck.

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  • Wrong skill-level: Looking at the question I doubt the OP can put your answer to any use.
    – foraidt
    Oct 9, 2009 at 8:12
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Is it possible that there's some javascript, firewall or anti-virus configuration on one machine, but not the other, which the particular site finds hard to deal with? Kind of as Jean-Lou Dupont suggested.

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  • Nope.. the computer that we're talking about has a fresh install of windows xp
    – burnt1ce
    Oct 10, 2009 at 14:23
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Have you thought about the nature of the website itself? Is there something specific to the website that is special? I had a similar problem a white back and it was simply down to something like that. It was simply a hardware/software limitation and I had to live with it.

That's ruling out things like network faults and other configuration specific issues that may exist with that computer...

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