Why won't my computer download at it's full potential?

Question

According to speedtest.net and myspeed.visualware.com, my internet connection is downloading at about 470kb/s. However, when i download items through firefox and torrents, the max speed is only like 36-40 kb/s. Is there something on my machine that is limiting the full speed? And is there anything I can do to change this?

Answer 1

The download speed depends greatly on where you're downlaoding from, the site might just be slow, I'm sure your computer is fine

Answer 2

If you're using FireFox 2, try installing the Faster Fox extension; it is geared more towards web pages but, I've noticed that it does help my downloads a little.  

Also, when you're downloading, you can always bring up the Task Manager and see what other programs are trying to access the internet while you are downloading, this may be causing some degradation in speed also.  

Answer 3

90% of websites you download from do what we called throttling. Basically they cap how much information you can download from them at a time. They do this so many people can download the file at the same time otherwise we would all be fighting over band width and nothing would get downloaded.

Answer 4

When you go to an internet connection test, they will usually give your results in kiloBITS per second (kbps). When you download something, it will usually display your speed in kiloBYTES per second (kBps). These are completely different...your computer is actually downloading at its top rate.