Speeding up internet in XP

[Stan_Lite]

Bit of background - I was trying out the Windows 7 Beta on my internet browsing machine in the computer room and, while it's pretty good and works well for the most part, it still has a few issues so I've decided to go back to XP on it until Windows 7 is out of Beta. That's all very well and good but I have the new 50Mb/s broadband from Virgin and XP simply can't cope with the speed.

Even running TCP Optimizer, I'm only getting about 30Mb/s with it - this test was run on my internet rig at about 07:00 this morning:



This is fine for the majority of the time but when I want to download something large from Newsgroups, it's a bit of a pain - I have to use one of the Vista machines to get the best from my connection. The Vista machines can get the full whack from the connection - this test was run on my gaming rig a few seconds after the above test:



Currently, I'm running XP on the internet rig, Vista on the gaming rig and Ubuntu on the media rig, all in the computer/entertainment room and Vista on the media rig in the living room.

I wanted to go back to XP on the gaming rig but if I did that, I wouldn't have access to the full speed at my desk and would have to go through to the living room to download stuff on the Media rig there and transfer the downloaded material to the machine on the desk or go to the other desk in the computer room to download on the Ubuntu rig and transfer the downloaded material.

I can't RDP into the living room media rig as that would log me out of there and stop the Folding SMP clients (they don't like running as a service yet - still in Beta)). I could RDP into the Ubuntu media machine at the other desk in the computer/entertainment room as that one isn't Folding but I'd rather see if there's any way to get the full speed from my brodband on the XP machine first to keep things simple.

So, basically, all that rambling leads me to my question. Does anybody know any way I can get the full 50Mb/s from my XP internet rig? If not my options are to either; go ahead and revert to XP on the gaming rig and RDP into the Ubuntu rig and transfer the downloaded files from there or keep Vista on the gaming rig and use that for big downloads I want to access from my desk.

Any suggestions would be most welcome