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What's wrong with my mac with its slow dl speed?

K

kunio

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 19, 2006
15
0
Australia
I changed to mac a week ago & found that the download speed is much slower than that of my previous pc. I like mac so far but the dl speed is unbearable.

I have the most recent macbook and broadband. I tried different browsers 'Camino' 'Firefox' and also made sure the built in firewall was open. Then I downloaded Azureus, transmission, tomato, and some more. The best of them was transmission but still 4kb/s?! Azureus had 1.5kb/s. I live in Sydney and its broadband speed is slower than a dial up of England. OMG. But when I had a pc, it was at least 50kb/s. There's a 256 mb file I regularly get & it used to take 1 to 2 hrs to download, now suddenly it takes 2 and half days. I searched various forums to solve this problem and found no answer. Some say the Mac is slower but shouldn't be this much. And others say Mac shows an honest number but then it should take about same time period.

What do you expert guys think? Do you think my Internet provider doesn't support Mac? Is it even possible? Or did I miss something to configure? Any help will be greatly appreciated. :confused:
 
I don't think it's your ISP at this stage. Run us through your network. Is it wireless? Can you download at full speed from within Safari (or a different browser) from regular sites on the internet? :)
 
kunio said:
What do you expert guys think? Do you think my Internet provider doesn't support Mac? Is it even possible? Or did I miss something to configure? Any help will be greatly appreciated. :confused:
Click to expand...
It's probably not your ISP, you probably missed something on the configuration ;)

as MJ suggested, run us through the network you have at home, if that's not an issue then it'll be the configuration of Azureus and suchlike.

Remember: torrents (legal or otherwise) can be notoriously slow to download on any computer - it depends on the number of peers sharing the file.

Go try downloading a file from somewhere using Safari/Firefox. How quickly can you download a 200mb file in one of those programmes?
 
kunio said:
Some say the Mac is slower but shouldn't be this much. And others say Mac shows an honest number but then it should take about same time period.

What do you expert guys think? Do you think my Internet provider doesn't support Mac? Is it even possible? Or did I miss something to configure? Any help will be greatly appreciated. :confused:
Click to expand...
Macs aren't slower at downloading, nor do they show a more honest number. There's something wrong in your case. I don't think it's the ISP either.

I've experienced something similar once. In that case it was a cable modem that didn't communicate properly with a router that I got. The packet loss was very high between the two and download speed was more than halved in this case. The solution in my case was to put a simple hub between the two, then they got along just fine.

Mad jew's right, we need to know more about your network and internet connection to get to the bottom of this.
 
Oh you guys are the best! I didn't expect to get this fast replies.

I agree it's unlikely to be the fault of the ISP but can't figure out what is wrong. It is connected with the ethernet cable and as gekko suggests it might be the fault of cable. Now I look at it, it kind of looks weak. Am I imagining things...:D I might have to change a cable and see. (Before I used USB cable with my pc so the only difference made are mac & cable)

And mj, I can download with full speed in the apple site 50kb/s but not in other regular sites such as Mozilla for example.
 
Nah. No proxies. Maybe I was very used to pc, now I feel a little annoyed. I have another trouble related to a terminal. It seems that I can't type my password. I needed to get in to delete this damn file (locked, no check box and not deleted with Onyx) I looked around three threads and it doesn't seem to work for me. I didn't get into any trouble with pc even when I started although everybody sings mac has an easier configuration. After all, I guess I will buy a desktop with pc. The best thing with pc is when you do get into trouble, due to enormous people have same machine you usually end up finding a relevant post in 10 seconds and the problem solved, at least for me. I find mac people very helpful thou, but feeling like a novice who's lost in california who came from new york is not much pleasure after all. Oh well time to go back to trouble shooting. :eek:

EDIT: The dl speed is a bit better after fixing the cable. I'm no technician but know a tiny bit. It improved to 8kb/s. If I buy a new cable, it might be even better. I also succeeded getting into terminal but still can't delete this file OMG. Now I'm looking at the other threads and if I can't solve it with the methods posted, I'll have to post the new thread...
 
I'd try unplugging everything (computer and modem/router especially) for a minute or so then plugging them in one-by-one. This resets some of your network settings on the modem/router and port settings on the Mac. See if that does any better.

As for the file you want to delete? Does it give you a dialogue box? What sort of file is it? Can you get it into the Trash?

These are pretty strange problems that you're having. Don't give up on us yet. :)
 
Mj, it was a cable after all. After changing it, I'm getting my usual dl rate. And about the trash problem, It's sorted out, too. I posted in another thread about it. Right now I'm going to do a boot camp and download the win xp sp, so hopefully I won't have any problem for a while. I'm not giving up yet I just realized there are cons and pros in mac just like pc. Thanks for help you guy.
 
Man, that musta been one ugly ethernet cable.

I'm not being insulting at all, it's just that I've made or bought dozens if not hundreds of cables over the years, and have run hundreds of meters of cable through crusty drop ceilings and all manner of electrically noisy environments. For all that, however ugly the cables looked, I have only twice had cables that didn't work properly, both of which were handmade and I had screwed up (one I wired the pins wrong, one just didn't work right for some reason). To have one cause that much packet loss on that low speed of a connection is really surprising.

Thin coax networks, on the other hand... I shudder. Perfect looking cable, tests fine one minute, total network failure every other minute as soon as you walk away from it. I was so glad to see 10Base-2 die.
 
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