A broadband problem nobody can solve

[ecswtrav]

This is quite a problem and Im hoping somebody can come to the rescue as up to now not even professionals have been able to.

A friends machine has a 1meg broadband connection. When he is browsing the machine is much much slower than my dial up connection and takes up to 3mins for a page to load - if it does actually load! At times it may be faster, although mostly it seems to be very slow. Funnily enough, when downloading it can reach high speeds although seems to slow down and speed up as if their is a bottleneck of some sort.

At first I put this down to the connection, but the service provider came out to the house twice (once whilst I was there) and ran their laptop using his connection and it was very fast with no problems. (they even ran a test which showed no problems). I browsed using their machine to double check and it was perfect.

We chnaged his operating system from Xp to ME and still no difference. We removed all additional software, and even additional pci cards etc and still no change. I then decided to bring my machine around to his house - the problem was still evident and still really slow - even on my computer.

The only thing our computers have in common are the motherboards and processors. We both have ECS K7s5a motherboards with SIS 735 chipsets and AMD 1500XP processors. I am holding these responsible but have no idea what I should do next.

The laptop even used his USB to ethernet adaptor so Ive ruled this out aswell.

Can anybody help or suggest anything
Thanks

[Zorak]

your friends machine may only have USB 1.0 or 1.1 insted of USB 2.0 Specifications, which could explain this problem quite easly.