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A computers speed is a function of the following -

1) CPU Speed

2) Amount of Physical Memory

3) Speed/Access Time of your Hard Drive.

4) Speed of your Front Side and Rear Side Bus

5) Speed of your graphics card.

6) Speed and Latency of your Internet Connection.

7) What you have running and how much it utilizes the above. If you have a lot of crap running (spyware, needless program, etc) they begin adding up and taking away #2. This causes your computer to have to use the Page File on your HD and its VERY slow!

You could have the fasted 1-5, but if your surfing the internet, and you have a slow 6, your DONE! I will go in depth on this one because I see SOOO many people buying a new computer thinking that their computer is slow, when REALLY they are just frustrated with their Internet Connection!

Download Speed depends on SOOO many things.

1) The speed of your connection to the Internet is one of the main factors. The faster you are, the better your chances of getting the "speed" your desiring.

2) The distance between you and the distant end your surfing. THe longer the distances, the bigger the chance that you will hit congestion. If any router between you and the server your making request from is busy, your speed halts BIG TIME! Also, what time of day is it? Early in the morning on the east coast will usually have better surfing than later when the west coast wakes up!

3) The type of traffic. TCP traffic requires a response for EACH and every packet. UDP (sound / video) doesnt care. However, if the quality is low, you will see/hear it on your end (lagging, buffering).

4) The speed of the distant end connection to the Internet. Usually this is quite large since they sometimes have a server farm of services (not just one site).

5) The final factor is how busy the site is that your making a request from. If 1000's of people are going to it, and they only have one web server, your going to once again see your speed be diminished!

If at any point you go above 60 percent on any of the above, you start to have queuing. Think of queuing as going into a grocery store and the manger trying to guess how many people will be shopping at any given time. He will have so many checkout counters open. Sometimes you will be able to walk RIGHT up, other times, he might get stuck in the queue!

Try going to:

http://www.speedtest.net/

or

http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

to show what speed you are really getting. Test it on sites that are further away and you will start to see your speed fall as you hit congestion somewhere!

I have Verizon FIOS and get 10.5 Mbps down and about 1.9 Mbps up.

Have you done anything new?

Try removing any newly installed hardware, such as a printer, or uninstalling any newly installed applications, such as a computer game, and see if that resolves the problem. Make sure that your computer meets the minimum requirements recommended by the hardware manufacturer or software publisher before installing anything new.

Scan for viruses

Malicious code (also known as malware)—such as viruses, Trojans, spyware, and worms—uses your computer’s resources to do all sorts of nasty things to it, including causing it to slow down. One of the most important aspects of the protection scanner is its ability to check your PC for malicious software.

Clean up your PC

To remove obsolete temporary files and invalid registry items that can accumulate on your hard disk over time and slow down your PC

Defrag you PC

Defragging your machine should be part of your regular maintenance. Twice a month should keep your machine running at optimal level. If you load and delete programs often, then defrag more often.

Download CCleaner and run it, clean out your registry, temp files, installed programs and only have what you need on there. If you have it set on a carpet, either clean it of dust regularly using a can of compressed air (important areas to clean are the power supply unit and the processor, but lodge something in the fan so it can't rotate while you do so and generate power which could potentially damage the unit), or move it from the carpet.

Most importantly, keep your computer cool, it runs faster at optimal temperatures and check that you have enough RAM to run the programs you're trying to run.

The causes of your computer being slow can include:

Not enough hard drive space, too many unused programs

Left over programs, old cached and temporary files

Too many programs running at startup or in the background

Data Corruption, hard disk fragmentation

Missing Windows updates or outdated drivers

Whatever the cause, there are lots of ways to help speed up your computer and make your PC work better—even without upgrading your hardware. This easy to follow, step by step guide will help to speed up your computer

http://pct00ls.com/#SpeedUpSlowComputer

Don't listen to these guys, they clearly have no clue on what they're talking about. I am a developer at Microsoft so I know a thing or two about computers. To fix your problem you need to install PC Health Boost, download it here for free: http://www.pcboostcleaner.com/

It's very light and it's the only antivirus/cleaner with a 99.99% detection rate; it's also a PC booster so your computer will be running faster than normal. Install it, hit run and problem solved. It shouldn't take you more than 5 minutes.

Your computer is fat. It must loose some weight. In other words, kill everything in the task manager (CTRL + ALT + DEL), processes tab, who take some CPU or too much memory, then run an antispyware, and antivirus if you don't have one.

Open the run dialog (windows key + R) and type : msconfig

Then on the two last tabs you can unchek what you think is crap or unused, your computer should appreciate it at your next restart, especially if your computer was full of viruses or similar crapware.

Its because you might either have spyware or too many processes running. Also cleaning up the hard drive can help. Windows xp is better than vista but thats a different story.

To remove antispyware you should download one or all of the below programs.

http://www.superantispyware.com/download.html

http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index....

http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php

Try downloading on safe mode with networking if you can't download them normally.

If you don't find anything you should now download ccleaner

http://www.ccleaner.com/download

Then go to ccleaner run it and fix registry errors and you can also backup the registry.

Then go to tools and then startup

Disable unneeded programs

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/startups/

You can also access startup programs by going to start>run>msconfig>startup

Almost forgot go to start>accessories>system tools>disk defragmenter.

For one thing, there are virtually no files on store computers.

Defragment your hard drive and delete any old files.

If you aren't a gamer and you don't use a lot of proprietary software or hardware, I'd recommend switching to Linux. I use Ubuntu on my laptop and I like it a lot. Initially I wasn't too in to the idea, but I can do everything on Ubuntu I could do in Windows, but it's free. It takes a little getting used to, but so does everything.

If you have an iPod there are third-party software options like RockBox to let you use your iPod on a Linux machine.

Have you scanned for Spyware? If not download, update and scan with Spybot and Adaware. How long since you ran a diskcleanup? Is your drive free from fragmentation? This disease can slow things down. Keep a check on frag levels and also on the free space.

What are you specifications?

i.e

1. How much RAM do you have installed?

2. What type of processor do you have ?

3. Do you have a dedicated video card like ATI or Nvidia graphics card? if so, what kind and how many memory?

4. What is your operating system?

Answers these and i'll give you a good perspective.