When I was in High School (already graduated) many other students used software like Limewire that completely destroyed the entire network speed wise.

It was a network of 3MBs, and to just download an 8MB windows driver took like 45 minutes.

I've tried Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, but could never suck out anymore than 5kb/s for a driver download to fix someone's computer (I was in the PC Maintenance class).

Though, I was starting to get in to Linux at the same time and enjoyed wget, once running wget, I noticed even at the same time my windows machine could only get 5kb/s, wget could easily get 100kb/s-280kbs.

Why was wget on the same network, able to do what Windows didn't seem to be able to do?

Also, this doesn't appear to be a freak occurrence, because the same result happened on various days and times, at least 5 times.

You used wget on Linux side.
What did you use on Windows side for the download?
Which Linux are you running the wget on?

Windows is known to be not very effective (by itself), as it can sacrifice network
speed for application speed (ie audio playing) if you configure it wrongly.
Did you try software tailored for downloading on the windows box?

I used mainly Internet Explorer but sometimes Firefox.
It was Debian.
Just two those listed above at the time, no download managers or anything like that.

I really don't know about windows myself, but what I have heard is that windows networking stack is a horrible hack of the/a BSD networking stack.

Any windows experts able to confirm or refute this?

Cheers,

Evo2.

They do use the bsd stack. If you run strings on any of the networking .exe's, you'll see plain as day. From what I've read they actually rewrote the tcp/ip stack in vista and beyond.