Hi,
My ISP has recently upgraded my cable connection from 4Mb to 10Mb. After the
upgrade went through I didn't notice as much of a speed increase as I had
expected so I went through a number of different tests to see what I was
getting.
Most of the online speed testers were reporting absolute nonsense (including
Dan Elwell's Broadband Speedtest, which I have always found to be one of the
best), so I resorted to downloading large game demo files directly off my
ISPs server and monitoring the average speeds over a number of subsequent
downloads).
My results indicated I was getting about half of what I would reasonably
expect from a 10Mb line.
I made a number of tweaks to my PC and cable modem which yielded some
reasonable results (the most significant of which was changing the upstream
channel on my cable modem). Despite this I was still only getting about 60%
of my expected bandwidth.
I then decided to try it with ZoneAlarm and Avast Antivirus switched off. My
download speeds immediately jumped up to what I'd expected.
It seems that with either ZA or Avast running on their own my download
speeds are fine, whenever I turn them both on together my speeds drop from
1100KB/s to around 650KB/s.
Can anyone explain why this would be happening? Is there anything I can do
(other than not using one of the two applications) to remedy this?
Many thanks,
Ed.
