Poor performance using Ubuntu 8.10!

[Chitty]

Hello everyone! I have something really strange going on, let me start from the beginnig...

I was using XP and 2 months ago I installed Ubuntu 8.10 in a diferent partition, so now I'm dualbooting... I use 90% of the time Ubuntu and rarely boot to XP.

Today I booted using XP and noticed how download speed is way greater than Ubuntu's, and similarly happens with sound volume, if I turn up volume to the max in Ubuntu is not even as half as loud as using XP. Files downloaded throught Firefox and Transmission in Ubuntu have download rates from 10kbps to 25kbps. I just downloaded a file using Firefox in XP and download speed was about 40-50kbps... (Using firefox 3.0 in both OS)

Does anyone have any idea of what's going on?



Thanks...

[bigtomrodney]

For sound, that can depend on the sound card. Often you'll have a few sections in the card's mixer so check to see if you have something like 'Front' as well as 'Master' and that both are set appropriately. Also, make sure the PCM channel is at a good level.

For downloads, that really depends. I will say that Transmission does not support DHT and as such is in contact with less peers. I loved the interface but moved away from it for that very reason. I'd suggest using the latest Ktorrent which is available in the repositories. It is much more configurable and supports DHT. As an aside ensure that you have your ports forwarded correctly - use the same port as your Windows bittorrent client or visit PortForward for help.

[Chitty]

For sound I played with the mixer and got better results, problem solved!
But for the downloading speed I think there is something more than a bittorrent client issue since downloading files in firefox using Ubuntu is about 20-30kpbs and using the same version of firefox for XP download speed is about 20kpbs faster...

Thank you very much for your help

[elija]

In some cases wireless cards have native drivers that perform worse that their Windows equivalents. I find Broadcom to be very susceptible to this and would recommend ndiswrapper and Windows drivers over the native ones any day.

On a wired network I have noticed the same performance difference but the other way round (Linux > Windows).

I Have never used a USB connection to the Internet so I can't comment on that.

[Chitty]

That's really weird because I'm not in a wireless network, I'm directly connected using an Ethernet cable