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Firefox d/l's at 5-6Mbps. Same machine IE d/l's at 17Mbps. What could the problem be?

SteveRosenberg
SteveRosenberg
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Built a new machine 60 days ago and loaded Win7, Firefox and a few other programs. Very little running in the background. In the last few weeks FF d/l speed has dropped to 5-6 Mbps. It was around 15 Mbps before. Tried clearing cache, refresh, etc. but no change.

On the same machine IE will d/l at 17 Mbps. This is a home network and the machine in question is wired to the router. A Fujitsu laptop connects to the same router via WiFi and on that machine FF d/l's at 16 Mbps. Using Safari on an iPad 2, also WiFi, I got 18 Mbps.

Finally, d/ling video on demand on my Samsung TV sometimes runs around 15Mbps and other times drops to 6 Mbps. It is also hard wired. None of this is affected by time of day or day of week as far as I can tell.

Built a new machine 60 days ago and loaded Win7, Firefox and a few other programs. Very little running in the background. In the last few weeks FF d/l speed has dropped to 5-6 Mbps. It was around 15 Mbps before. Tried clearing cache, refresh, etc. but no change. On the same machine IE will d/l at 17 Mbps. This is a home network and the machine in question is wired to the router. A Fujitsu laptop connects to the same router via WiFi and on that machine FF d/l's at 16 Mbps. Using Safari on an iPad 2, also WiFi, I got 18 Mbps. Finally, d/ling video on demand on my Samsung TV sometimes runs around 15Mbps and other times drops to 6 Mbps. It is also hard wired. None of this is affected by time of day or day of week as far as I can tell.

All Replies (2)

cor-el
cor-el
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  • Top 10 Contributor
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It is possible that security software (anti-virus, firewall) is causing the problem. Try to disable security software temporarily to see if that makes a difference.

Boot the computer in Windows Safe mode with network support to see if that has effect in case security software is causing problems.

SteveRosenberg
SteveRosenberg Question owner
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Thanks for your prompt and helpful reply. Turning anti-virus (AVG) and firewall (Windows) off made no difference at all. However, in safe mode, Firefox achieved download speeds of 17Mbps. I tested IE also and it performs at this level in regular and safe modes.

So the question remains, in regular mode what could be causing Firefox to download slowly but doesn't have the same effect on IE?

All suggestions welcome!