Ok here is the situation.

I have two laptops. One is a dell 2Ghz processor 256MB RAM running windowsXP pro and the other is an old apple ibook 700Mhz 128MB RAM running ubuntu Gnome.

Playing around with them I noticed something. The linux ibook takes forever to load programs due to the low RAM but on the net loaded pages seem about the same or sometimes even faster than the dell windows box.

So as a test I found a decent sized file and downloaded it with both machines.

Now the dell windowsXP machine downloaded the file in firefox at around 15-25Kb/s

But the ibook linux machine downloaded the same file in firefox at 180-200Kb/s!!!

What gives? The dell machine has more RAM and faster clock yet the linux machine downloaded much much faster. Does linux just download files faster than windows or am I missing something?

A faster processor and more memory don't necessarily translate into faster downloads, by any means. Faster processing, yes, faster reconstruction of files, no...downloading doesn't require a whole lot of processor-intensive activity, so your results aren't that unbelievable.

Is there a difference in your network cards? Or is the Windows machine doing something else on the network at the same time, which may be hogging bandwidth? Any background programs that could be running, for example (I'm not trying to insinuate spyware, although that may be a concern)?