Ubuntu Download Speeds Beat Windows XP's

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 15, 2009 @09:52AM from the aggregated-circumstances dept.

narramissic writes "Doing a download speed test of his Time Warner cable connection, James Gaskin discovered something odd, something that he is quick to note isn't a rigorous benchmarked lab test. The discovery: His Ubuntu machine 'returned a rating from the Bandwidth.com test of 22-25mbps over several tests' while the same test done from a Windows XP PC returned a rating of 12-14mbps. The two computers used in the test are 'almost identical: both off-lease Compaq small form factor D515s, part of the very popular corporate desktop D500 family. Both have Pentium 4 processors running at 2GHz. The Ubuntu machine has 768MB of RAM, while the XP box has only 512MB of RAM. Both run Firefox 3 as their browser.' Gaskin's question: Can a little extra RAM make that much difference in Internet download speeds or does Ubuntu handles networking that much faster than Windows XP?"

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Dual Booting - Speeds I logged by FredMcCord · 2009-01-15 10:35 · Score: 5, Interesting

Dell XPS M1530 Intel Core 2 Duo (2.16ghz) 3 gigs RAM Dual Booting Windows Vista Home Premium AND Ubuntu 8.10 http://www.bandwidth.com/tools/speedTest/ Six tests per OS. Vista: Download/Upload 7616/2795 7865/2724 6407/2755 10050/2800 12320/3925 15854/2905 Ubuntu: Download/Upload 12939/5897 8849/12122 15373/18646 20040/17093 8461/14969 17885/13807