Broadband speed

I have a laptop that I use for my work. I bring it home some evenings to connect to the office and read mail etc. I do this via Esat broadband.

Lately my young kids want me to let them look at some BBC web site e.g. Tweenies, Balamory etc. They're getting a bit "rough" with the laptop so I decided to buy a new machine from Dell. This was delivered today and I've set it up. I also set up my broadband modem.

The problem I'm having is that the speed is nothing like the speed I get on my laptop. When I float the mouse over the icon that appears on the task bar, the following is displayed:

Local Area Connection 3
Speed: 10.0 Mbps
Status: Connected

The machine that I got is a Dell Dimension 4700.

Any suggestions on what I've done wrong?

Here is a speed test.

[broken link removed]

Are you accessing the web independently of the laptop or at the same time (via a router/gateway)?

You might want to review before assuming anything about speeds.

Local Area Connection 3
Speed: 10.0 Mbps
Status: Connected

This just means that you have a 10Mbps (10,000,000 bits per second) network card installed which presumbaly is connected to your broadband router/hub. Since your broadband will have a nominal speed rating (actual throughput will be lower) of something like 512Kbps (512,000 bits per second) the this will most likely be the main bottleneck. The first thing to do is to check what speed you are getting on the PC and the laptop using a speed tester like the one mentioned above or in the other topic linked above. They you can start trying to diagnose where the problems, if any, lie.