I noticed that after switching from Windows XP to Suse 9.1 that my download speeds almost tripled. In fact all of my web browsing seems noticably faster. For example when I was downloading Java/Netbeans package I was hitting speeds over 400Kbs.

On the same hardware and internet connection the fastest downloads id ever get on XP were around 150Kbs, but they often hovered around 90.

Any ideas why this would be, other than "because windows sucks". I'm just curious if theres a reason for this or if its just a coincidence. Does linux just naturally handle web traffic better than windows?

well what are you supposed to be getting? What service are you paying for?

my cable internet provider advertises 4Mbs download speeds. its just funny because ive never even speeds over 200Kbs until i installed Linux.

as much as i'd want to blame M$, there's really no reason that should be the case...

Well, it was probably just coincidence, but I've also had this a few times. It was the same download from the same site/server, but it went a few times faster. Unfortunately, it's not all the time like that. Would be groovy!

Unless you had some spyware installed that was sucking some major bandwidth there really shouldn't be much of a difference. If you have a router, there should be no difference because that's what communicating with your ISP, not your computer and you should have at least 10MB b/w between you and your router so that wouldn't be any kind of bottleneck unless you had some kind of super connection