Broadband speed boosters

[Frightcrawler]

Yesterday I went to PC Pit Stop to check my speed, which was around 350 kb/s (rather slow for a dsl modem, but i never got too agitated) Then I clicked on the "speed tweaker" link, and i clicked on Typical Latency. Numbers changed, but i remember my first number was around 6500. Then, i forgot all about it.

Now, it is morning. I run the same test again at pcpitstop, and my speed is !1457! Thats ALOT to me, considering i had 1/5 of that usually.

How did it work?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Complete waste of time in my experience. The speed testers are a sham, as you're just testing your speed to that one specific server, which often seems to have sufficiently crappy bandwidth as to affect the speed calculation. You don't need anything special to test your bandwith; just go download a file. Try downloading a somewhat large (a few MB) file from somewhere with obscene amounts of bandwidth, such as some linux kernel source from kernel.org.

As for the "tweaking" crap that those sites talk about so much - I don't know. When I used windows, I seemed to always hit my bandwidth caps, assuming the place I was connecting to had enough bandwidth to do so. Same thing happens in any other OS. The only way I can see them making a difference is if there's something horridly wrong in the first place, and I doubt that's the case, unless you're using windows 95 or something.