Of course, it??™s also possible that you??™re hitting the upper limit of your broadband
connection. But whether or not an upgrade from your ISP is worth the
money depends on the bandwidth you??™re getting now and the amount of
cash your ISP is demanding for the faster service. If your connection measures
more than 1 Mbps (1,024 Kbps), it??™s unlikely you??™ll notice a huge difference
in real-world speed with a faster connection unless you download a
lot of large files (such as music). On the other hand, more expensive connections
sometimes offer substantially higher upload speeds, which may be
worth the added cost if you spend a lot of time sending files to web servers,
or even if you want to host a web site on your PC.
Do-it-yourself bandwidth test
One of the simplest ways to measure the throughput is to transfer a binary
file (such as a .jpg or .zip file) from your computer to another location and
then back again, recording the time it takes to complete the transfer each
way. Just divide the file size by the transfer time to get the throughput, typically
in kilobytes or megabytes per second.
When testing the speed between two PCs on your local network (for
instance, when comparing the speed of your wireless network with that of
cables), you might be inclined to drag and drop the files in Windows
Explorer, a process discussed at length in Chapter 8. Sure, it??™s a good realworld
test, but Windows??”and Vista in particular??”adds a lot of overhead
to this process, so it won??™t be a true test of raw throughput.
Pages:
538
539
540
541
542
543
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556
557
558
559
560
561
562