GolfHos

Hopefully, you guys will be able to educated this old fart about the why's and wherefore's about speed tests on puters.

I have a mac G5 and wife has mac pro.  We have  wireless network using an apple extreme.  It is the one that looks like a spaceship.  Comcast is the provider and we use their modem.  Modem is connected to the wireless device using cable.  Both of our machines are in the daylight basement and the apple extreme and modem is on floor above us.

I have run 3 tests on my machine in the past 10 minutes and I get download speeds of 6 to 7.16 mb/s.  Ran 2 tests on wife's machine and she had speeds of 15.96 and 11.something.

Why is there such a difference?

Longer cables is not an option.

Speedtest.net was used for testing.

LMAO.

OTT, no help.  Going away.

Aside from the obvious answer being your wife's computer is better.  And broadband delivered to your home can vary at any given time.  My iMac can be anywhere from 12-17 mps depending on when I test it.

But I think (I'm not that much of a computer knowing type guy) it is the difference between each computer's wireless access points of the 802.11 variety.  Some being faster than others.  Other than that I don't know.  And I could totally be making this up, because I'm litterally running long cables in favor of a wireless network. 

Wow, those are fast speeds.

I'm totally guessing here, but my first thought is similar to Walfredo's.  If the G5 is older, maybe it's running an older version of the 802.11 wireless protocol.  802.11a, b, g, n, etc.

If you look at this page:
http://wireless.liv.ac.uk/wireless_abgn.php

Each has different realistic top speeds, and some are more impacted by interference.

I'm not sure of an easy way to check though.

You could try downloading iStumbler, a free tool to measure wireless network strength.
http://www.istumbler.net/

what are your dephonculator settings?
comcast factory defaults are notorious
just saying

:) Made me oogle dephonculator. Of course I had to laugh at myself.

I am using the comcast modem and using the factory defaults.  Didn't know that the modem had any such things or could be changed.  However, don't understand why that would make any difference if both our machines are using that modem through the airport extreme base station.  Airport uses 802.11g and so does my machine.  Wife's machine can accept 802.11n , but it receives what the airport is limited to.

When I ran the 3 tests on mine, I also ran 2 tests on my wife's.  Our machines are 10 feet apart and when I started on test on mine I would then start test on hers and would continue that pattern.  All tests were done within total time of 7 minutes.

I always thought my machine was pretty robust.  It is a Power Mac G5 with dual processor 1.8 GHz with 3.5 ram.

Just this past June and July I would test and this machine would get results at 11 to 16 Mb/s.  I just ran the test at same time on both machines and her machine was at 14.54 and mine was 6.24.  Oh, and the other thing is that I really don't see a difference in performance between the 2 machines interoogle wise.  It is something that does not make sense to me.

So what your saying is that this is purely a *8==>* out contest between you and the wife? [sm_devil] ;D

LOL

Have to admit that I haven't said anything to the wife about it.  But you have triggered the thought that perhaps this is evidence to be used to obtain a new machine!!!!!  One that is totally unnecessary.

Don't know if I mentioned this before.  I am using my desktop hooked up to 52 inch HD TV screen.  I sit on couch using wireless keyboard and wireless mouse.

So, I started to think what might be different now then this past summer.  Well, I noticed that the tower was slid back against the wall just barely to the right of the screen.  Also, wife put a lamp in front of the tower because she needed a place to put the lamp.

I ran speed test again and got barely 4.5mb/s.  Moved the lamp and got 6.8.  Moved the back end of the tower where the wireless airport card is (It is an item that looks like a 3 inch long T that sticks out of the back) and got 15.9 mb/s!!!!!.  Moved it back to where it was just a few seconds ago and got about 6.  I think I solved the problem.  Now need to convince the wife that yes, it does not look pleasing with my set up but I get supposedly 3 times the speed.  Oh, moved the tower to where I want it and got just a little over 16.

I hope reason wins out over appearance.

Yeah, good luck with that.  ::)

Buy a Mac Mini.