Help! Two different PCs getting very different online speeds

[cheapie]

i have two computers at home, one personal and one work, both of which are using wireless. Work PC = B Home PC= G

the router is a WRTU54G.

my home PC is newish dell and my work PC is an oldish dell.

anyhoo...my home PC is getting/showing ~10m dl speeds. my work PC is getting/showing .5m speeds.

what's the deal? what could be making my work PC access the web so much slower?

[InfiniteNothing]

2.4 GHz interference? I wonder what would happen if you disable G on your router. Signal strengths are both good? Virus on the slow pc?

[cheapie]

i've figured out that when i use IE on my work computer it's fine. FF is much, much slower.....at least according to bandwidth meters.

but i'm using FF on my home PC. crap.


doesn't seem to be anything wrong or different with my firewall settings.

[cheapie]

edit: just disabled zonelabs and FF is fine now. why would zonelabs slow down FF but not i.e.?

[Jeffbx]

Because ZoneAlarm sucks ass. We stopped using it because it caused flaky issues like that on just about every machine we installed it on. This latest version was supposed to solve a lot of issues, but as far as I'm concerned, it's still flaky.

I know it's not up to you if it's a work machine, but you should just use the Windows firewall - that's all the firewall you need.

[ray]

i agree with JeffBX. I used zonealarm back in college thinking i was protecting myself. After I took it off, my computer ran so much smoother.

[DarkFury]

I know it's not up to you if it's a work machine, but you should just use the Windows firewall - that's all the firewall you need.
If only the Windows firewall monitored "outbound" traffic...

I don't want E.T. (escaped telecommunications) to phone home... Maybe ZA will get this fixed one day.

[Kevster]

The only firewalls I have are hardware based (Cisco or Juniper).