Why does the Internet load slowly on my brand-new laptop?
 

I just bought this for school and, unlike the $300 laptop it replaced, it loads everything quickly, except for the Internet. I just did a speed test and it said that I had an excellent connection with 500KB download speeds!

What year is this?

I keep trying to do schoolwork in my room where I cannot hear my family and the television as well, but then some web pages never load, so I get on my desktop, which does everything quickly, but I struggle to tune out my environment. I have been trying to search for a solution on-line, but everything that I find either points out the obvious, or is actually about something completely different.

My CPU usage is at 14%, so it shouldn't be a virus. Resource Monitor hardly shows any Internet being used. It did not seem any faster when I unplugged the ethernet cable from my desktop and plugged it into the laptop. Windows says the driver is up-to-date.

Do you guys have any idea why the Internet is so slow on my brand-new laptop, while my two year-old desktop and my 4.5 year-old phone are great?

Thanks!

Your new laptop meets the current NSA requirements of funneling everything you do through their systems. It essentially triples your bandwidth usage because everything gets downloaded to you, bounced to them where it's analyzed, logged and then sent back to you to be loaded on your screen.

Didn't you get the memo?

Maybe your computer is just too busy sending everything you do to Redmond. What is your upload speed?

https://wccftech.com/windows-10-data...soft-collects/

500 KBps, or 500 kbps?

One is kinda bad, and the other is terrible. Latency?

You're using a better (different) browser than IE, right? Did you know people who use 3rd party browsers tend to be more productive and more successful in their work than those who use use the default?

14% CPU is high for an idle utilization on a new laptop. Did you remove all the bloatware that normally accompanies the laptop?

Ah, bit or byte. I do not remember.

I Google's speed test says 33.8 Mbps download, 2.44 Mbps upload, but I have had school files that never downloaded. I do not know if you still need to clear your cache between tests, but I wanted to do a different test to be sure. I first tried to do C-Net's test, but it never fully loaded in either Vivaldi or Brave.

When I first bought this laptop I loaded Internet Explorer, downloaded Vivaldi, and it was so slow that I installed Brave, but Brave does not have an import wizard for Vivaldi, and I have not set up my accounts on Brave yet, so I keep both open (with many tabs). In fact, I have IE open also, just because that is what Win10 used to open the PDFs from school. I also have Word, Excel, and Powerpoints open, my Kindle textbook, and other programs, but those others should be small.

Apparently the Internet is finally working right on my laptop. Case closed everybody?

What changed?

I had a DSL modem that would continually drop communication whenever a torrent download was in progress. A minute after exiting the torrent download, normal reliable connectivity would resume.

When you experience the slowness, do a continuous ping to some server on the internet, like ping google.com. There should be no request timeouts, and the reply should rarely go above 100 ms.

Google pinged at 63 ms. One of the webpages listing things to troubleshoot showed a ping of 103.

I had webpages that never loaded at 63. How bad would 103 be?

Are you using a wireless router? What is the bandwidth? What is your Internet connection?

The only hardware in the laptop that really affects the speeds of downloads is the networking interface.

103 isn't too bad. It's 1/10th of a second after all.

Sounds like the issue has passed though?

The thing about the internet is that we don't get to pick the route our data takes, and the route is subject to change at any time.

The test you did where you connected the ethernet cable from a known good computer into your laptop is very good troubleshooting. I'd also disable the wifi just to be sure it's using the wired connection.

If it's slow on the wired connection on your laptop, but not slow on the desktop, that pretty well points to a software issue on your laptop. Try a variety of browsers.

PM me if you want to chat or do a remote session to troubleshoot after 5pm PST.

By the way, I like to go into Programs and Features (appwiz.cpl) and look at what's installed. Anything that looks unfamiliar I look up on a website called www.shoultiremoveit.com. It can give you an idea of what the program does, and what reputation it has with others. Remove things you don't use or are known to be buggy or poor performing.

You do use an adblocker, I hope? If not, get one.