A friend of mine has just bought a netbook – a Samsung… I tell everyone I love my Lenovo and they buy Samsungs anyway – and he noticed how slow its wireless networking was compared to his MacBook.
I fired up my Lenovo Ideapad S10-2 and my ancient G4 PowerBook and I found the same thing too.
I used broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk and did each test twice. My friend and I both have 02 broadband and I’m guessing we have the same router.
Lenovo Windows Netbook – 1.66GHz Atom – via 802.11g wifi running WindowsXP
5872 kbps download
788 kbps upload
Old Powerbook G4 – OS X – 1.66GHz PowerPC – via 802.11g wifi
11144 down
793 up
Lenovo Netbook – WinXP via ethernet
13936 down
772 up
But here is the really interesting thing…
Lenovo Netbook running Ubuntu Netbook Remix off a USB stick:
Download speed 11950 Kbps
Upload speed 927 Kbps
So with the same hardware, the Lenovo netbook’s wireless networking appears to be twice as fast under Linux – and Linux running off a USB stick to boot. I tried fiddling with the Broadcom settings in WinXP but it didn’t make any difference to the reported speeds. Very, very odd. Maybe a virus checker or firewall is slowing WinXP down?