EddScott

Our office in Cardiff is in a trial area for fibre optic broadband FTTC I believe they like to call it. Its something like 40 megabit line.

Anyway, one of the lads in cardiff has often complained that the PCs are **** and need upgrading. Now they have this new fast broadband, they are not seeing that much of a difference in useage terms - page loading times etc.

I'm getting flack that we need new computers because the old ones can't use the new broadband to its potential.

This I think is utter bollards. Am I not right in saying that even at 40megabits, a 5 year old PC is twiddling its thumbs waiting for pages to load given that even its ancient PIII processor can munch information far quicker than the line can deliver it?

john banks

If just transferring the data, yes. If processing the data to do all the stuff on a modern webpage, even my work single core P4 at 3GHz feels slow now, especially with 512MB.

On the same connection at home (actual speed 7Mbps), my 4GHz dual core feels much faster than an older tech 1.6GHz laptop dual core.

TonyBurns

iTrader: (3)

With 100mb ethernet connection at work, our old (p4 2.5ghz) pc's are really slow so thats going to slow you down, a good high(ish) spec pc will give you more bandwidth/processing power so hence will see better performance

Tony

EddScott

oh, ok. I just didn't think you'd get a bottleneck at the PC just because its a bit slow.

My work machine is an Intel dual core 1.6 with 1gb of ram and it doesn't feel any slower than my home PC which is clocked at 3.6 and 4GB ram.

andys

What OS? Cheap option might be to bung another gb of memory in the work machines

EddScott

I've given most at least 1gb of ram. One of our machines is a 2.4Ghz Celeron with only 512MB and although it feels a little sluggish compared to a modern machine, its hardly un-useable.

40Mb line for a small IFA practice is overkill IMO and hardly worth spending several thousand pounds just so twatter loads a bit quicker on new PCs

tarmac terror

iTrader: (2)

There are a couple of factors that may be in play here - Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) installations run fibre from the exchange to a cabinet in proximity to your office location. These can carry a theoretical maximum speed of 250mbps. Depending on the run length of copper to the cabinet you will see speeds drop to around 50mbps with runs of around 1Km. The other issue is that these are adaptive rate services, so the further you are from the cabinet, the more your real speed will drop off.

Trouble with this scenario I find is that what is too slow for a web page to load. There have been studies done which show the average time a user is prepared to wait for a webpage to render, is around 8 seconds.

If your pages are loading fully in under 8-10 seconds I would be telling the user to get knotted. Gather up some stats on processor and RAM usage over a month or so and see if his claims are supported.

Dont know anything about your architecture or topology, I will asume windows XP, and possibly 2003 domain. I would stuff the boxes with as much RAM as they will accommodate. Its a cheap upgrade and will improve their performance.

What do your users use the internet for is the other question I would ask.

I would also be checking the network traffic, to see which clients are accessing what or downloading large volumes of information.

ChrisB

IMHO...

Unless it's a really busy Internet connection (which it doesn't sound like), then I would wage that 40Mbps delivers little performance benefits for general web surfing than 4 or 8Mbps. If everyone was trying to watch Youtube in HD then it might or you're downloading lots & lots & lots of files/ISOs/etc. 40Mbps will also start to show what web sites / servers have decent bandwidth available and which are hosted are on damp pieces of string.

What router / firewall do you have? When you start to look at throughput of routers, there's an lot of vendors which either don't quote figures at all or give vague figures (eg "up to xMbps"). I'm a fan of SonicWall devices and if you look at their quoted figures for the low end of their range (once you start turning on security services eg gateway AV), then you are well under 40Mbps of throughput. A Cisco 877 is a £300 router, but Cisco's own figures reckon it's good for 12.8Mbps.

As already posted, a bit more RAM might help in general performance

EddScott

Thanks for the replies.

We have XP in all offices and theres nothing Vista has to offer us that warrants changing the OS - plus some of the machines would likely struggle with it. Our copier also only has XP drivers.

We don't have any type of server to client network - we don't need it. We just have one PC on 24/7 that stores all our files and we can access this locally or use gotomypc.
I have put more RAM into most of the machines that seemed to be struggling or slowing down and as for web useage its not even close to its limits at the 8Mb or whatever it is here.

We've had IT "consultants" tell us that the network is carp and needs updating and all the machines are out of date and by the way heres the bill for £5K - £10K whatever silly price they can put on it. I don't know as much as others but I know how to build a reliable simple network (its never failed in 3 years) for our purposes so I just play dumb and see how a big a hole they dig themselves.

The chap giving the grief over the state of the machines "thinks" he knows what he's talking about having worked for an ISP for a year or two. Our MD doesn't know anything about computers but gets carried away when the BT salesman says its faster and will be absolutely awesome for you. I point out that its unlikely to make any difference whatsoever and the following week its installed.