A new laptop, even the best in the world, won’t make your downloads any faster.
I struggle to make sense of this. Most obviously, network cards have gotten better with time. It obviously depends on what you’re coming from and what you’re changing to, but of course a laptop upgrade could make your downloads faster?
The bandwidth of a network card would generally outclass your internet connection by an order of magnitude.
Gigabits per second network cards have been standard for at least a decade.
And then there’s your wifi too, if applicable, but even that is much faster than your general internet connection, unless you’re far from your router. A new laptop might help you get a better wifi signal, if it had a newer wifi protocol or stronger radio, but that’s also going to depend on your router.
But in front of all of that is going to be your modem. Depending on the quality of your modem that might be a bottleneck.
I feel like I can download files to my newest laptop faster than I can move them around locally on my older ones. But maybe I’m just getting old, and my reference points are dates. Or maybe I just don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s also likely.
Is it possible the hard drive is failing in the old one? I don’t know what the operating system would do if download speed surpassed write speed, but once it couldn’t hold it in ram any longer waiting to write I guess it would have to throttle it.
I struggle to make sense of this. Most obviously, network cards have gotten better with time. It obviously depends on what you’re coming from and what you’re changing to, but of course a laptop upgrade could make your downloads faster?
The bandwidth of a network card would generally outclass your internet connection by an order of magnitude.
Gigabits per second network cards have been standard for at least a decade.
And then there’s your wifi too, if applicable, but even that is much faster than your general internet connection, unless you’re far from your router. A new laptop might help you get a better wifi signal, if it had a newer wifi protocol or stronger radio, but that’s also going to depend on your router.
But in front of all of that is going to be your modem. Depending on the quality of your modem that might be a bottleneck.
I feel like I can download files to my newest laptop faster than I can move them around locally on my older ones. But maybe I’m just getting old, and my reference points are dates. Or maybe I just don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s also likely.
In either case, thanks for the explanation!
Is it possible the hard drive is failing in the old one? I don’t know what the operating system would do if download speed surpassed write speed, but once it couldn’t hold it in ram any longer waiting to write I guess it would have to throttle it.