I got connected via ADSL to the interweb this morning, after years of painful and unreliable dialup.
Accessing the web was fairly quick on my linux laptop, and I eventually managed to get PPTP tunneling working to the office.
Unfortunately my wife's XP laptop is struggling to acheive the internet performance of a dialup modem.
Very puzzling as we have a small LAN of 2 laptops and a netgear 4 way ADSL modem/router/firewall. The ADSL is connected fine and I can use the internet just fine from my laptop.
Once again Windows XP is making life a pain, I really wish we had got a Mac rather than a HP PC with a ton of crap and badly configured XP.
Normally when someone has Win XP and a fast network connection to the interweb, but finds things slow I suggest that their machine is horribly infected. However if the machine is walled off behind a proper firewall, then this is less likely to be the problem.
How fast is data transfers between your two machines? Is the XP box slow at everything, or just the interweb?
You are probably correct, a Mac would have been a better buy, you can still save the PC by putting something more sane on it, such as a Linux or BSD, though I'll admit getting notebooks with their proprietary hardware to work properly can be a pain for anyone other than the original vendor, even installing Windows on them can be hard...
I recommend completely reinstalling a fresh copy of XP or even going with Win2k. When I bought my HP PC it had so much vendor-installed crap running in the background it was unusable. Since I installed Win2k, things have been pretty good.
