scoobyboy

thinking of getting broadband but need to know is there much noticeable difference in the speed. i want to download movies but if it's still going to take hours would it be worth the extra money?
my bro has the 512 and that does songs in minutes but has taken days so far to do a film. is it possible to do a film in 3-4 hours?

Iain Young

For day to day browsing you won't notice any difference. For downloading large files you will notice a significant speed increase. However, it's only doubling the theoretical download speed so if a file takes three days to download with 512, the quickest it'll download with 1mb is 1.5 days.

Note that a lot depends on the speed of the server you are downloading from, network traffic etc as well.

Corgi

Well that all depends where you download from, if it's a constant 512 or 1meg of course you can notice the difference in speed, it's twice as fast.

I download from the newsgroups vitually 24 hours a day and on my 1meg connection a dvd of 4.7gb takes about 8 hours, a divx movie takes about 90 mins.

Don't use kazza, anyone using it nowadays really is a dumbass, IMO of course.

scoobyboy

it may well be worth the extra then if it could do it in 8 hrs, whats a divx movie thenare they different to dvds

jjones

divx is is mpeg format - i.e a compressed format. your media player uses a codec to decompress the data - bit like using winzip to unzip a zip file, winrar for a rar file etc.

they are usually 700-800mb in size compared to a dvd of 4.7 gb

Corgi

Mr jones is right, divx is about 1/8th the size of a dvd, you can buy dvd/divx players for about £90.

1 divx will fit on a cdr and you can get between 4 and 8 on a dvdr.

GC8

Look out for an ISP called Bulldog; they offer 1 amd 2 MBps lines at prices that you wont believe. The lines offer a 512 Kbps connection during business hours and the higher bandwidth at all other times, using their redundant capacity; Bulldog deal principally with business users..... 2Mbps costs about £29 per month I think!

Simon

cong

i think 512k should be sufficient because most over people would need the same speed aswel your uptime will most pobably be different to your download time the most itwill be 256k upload and 256k download or usually 384k down load and 128k upload most so if your downloading off another computer then there would be a bottle neck at there computer so even if you get 2mb line there over computer uploading would be nowhere near as fast

Iain Young

Of course, if you've got a 2mb link and the server you are downloading from only runs at 512kb then you're only going to use a quarter of your download bandwidth. However, what this means is that you can download other files (or go web browsing) whilst downloading without affecting the speed of the original download (in theory anyway )...

scoobyboy

wow you lot certainly know your stuff!!

JackClark

Remember Kids.

SPelham

Corgi
What newsgroups do you use ??