How does Microsoft detrmine (INCORRECTLY!!!) connection speed for downloads?

General Discussion (off topic) Anything and everyt
#1

Can anyone tell me why downloads from Microsoft sites are so incredibly slow?
And how Microsoft determines (erroneously) the connection speed of the machine?
It does actually say this amount data will take such and such a time at your connection speed… so there may be a registry value that is set incorrectly.

Tuesday’s monthly update took approximately 7 - 8 hours on my XP Pro SP3 system.
The amount of data for the updates would download from any other site in no more than a minute.
Yet I am seeing speeds from Microsoft of 1 Kb/s.
It would download faster on a Dial-up line.
It is the same whether you use IE, Firefox or Dragon. (Wireless and Ethernet are no different)
I tried all three browsers to download EMET 4.0 from Microsoft the other day and all suffered exactly the same speeds.

I have ‘googled’ for hours trying to find a solution, without success.

Any pointers would be appreciated.

#2

Maybe their servers are currently slow because Patch Tuesday (2nd Tuesday of the month) was only 2 days ago (it was a fairly big update on most systems as well).

#3

Hi Kail,

I’m sure that is not the issue. Last month I was on holiday when 2nd Tuesday came about, so I was over a week late updating and suffered the same slow downloads.

I believe it is something to do with how Microsoft determines the connection speed on the machine.

I’ve just tried to download from Microsoft; the 8MB EMET 4.0 msi and it is showing 1 hour 8 minutes to download.
From any other site, it would take a matter of seconds on this machine.

It must have something to do with settings/registry values on this machine.
I know it cannot be anything to do with my network setup otherwise I would be suffering the same problems across the board.

Thanks for your reply

#4

Check the latest updates.
No one has access in OS?
Maybe this will help.

#5

Thanks folks I’ve cracked it!

Nothing to do with windows update.

Writing things down on this site made me think about the comment I made about ‘it being faster on dial-iup’

I went through the registry and found a dial-up entry that I required when my broadband connection was ‘out of order’.

(And I don’t recommend anybody doing this!) but I deleted that entry in the registry.
Rebooted and Voila!
EMET 4.0 8MB downloaded in 7 seconds.

This begs the question why Microsoft try to determine your download speed when no other site seems to do so?

Anyway, thanks for your input.