Right, I just got :



And off microsoft :



Now, whilst speedtest seem's to be the recent daddy of ADSL and cable broadband test's you can see quite clearly that it isn't.

On a 1 meg line I would see about 996 - 1000k a sec, on the 20 meg line I see 1. - 1.8 meg a second.

Now, 56k modems gave you what? 4 - 5k a sec if you was lucky.

1 meg line is about 56k k a second
2 meg line is about 128k a second
4 meg line is about 380 odd k a second
5 meg line is about 500k a second

You see the pattern here ?

As for m8y's laptop being significantly quicker then yours, what's the spec of the machine ? A fresh install of windows might generally speed things up a little, but not massive amounts.