Question : Laptop/PC broadband speeds massively different

I am at my bosses house helping him with a few pc's issue and noticed the following;

He is on Virgin Cable, and has his modem all connected up to his Netgear wireless router which is attached to the PC (Vista Home).  When running a speedtest (www.speedtest.net) the PC gets around 1712kbps and he is on a 20MB service.

His wireless laptop mind you (XP home) when running the same test comes back with always over 9600kbps.

How is this possible?  Is there some sneaky Vista issue here?

Answer : Laptop/PC broadband speeds massively different

>>Default TCP Receive Window (RWIN) = 66976

that's the important one. At home I have 15/15 Verizon FiOS, and I had to change my RWIN to be able to upload at speeds over 4mbit. In XP, it is really easy to change these settings, using a couple different programs. I always set my RWIN to a scale factor of 16x, which will give you 1025024 for your RWIN.

ok i have dug up more info: how to disable tcp-ip auto-tuning in vista

http://www.speedguide.net/faq_in_q.php?qid=247

after doing that, speedguide.net's optimizer should work. Give that a try and let me know!