techevang

You sound like a really interesting guy, with some awesome experience!

Yeah, and all of the big 'back office' stuff corporations use. Exchange (an email server program) IIS (a program that hosts websites) MSSQL (a ummm, errrr, things that does databases!)

Its kind of a bit of a wild guess, but I guess it could be possible that the IE9 is useing a more optimal MTU for your system. I think that would be more likely to be true on your XP box anyway. Perhaps have a play with this, It doesnt change your MTU but allows you to change some stuff that might effect your testing. Use at own risk! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tweak-network/

Clonezilla user here! It might not be one for the totaly un-nerdy ones, but it does everything and the docs / site / community is good. http://clonezilla.org/ The limitations are probably quite useful to know about, although they didnt impact me. Limitations: The destination partition must be equal or larger than the source one. Differential/incremental backup is not implemented yet. Online imaging/cloning is not implemented yet. The partition to be imaged or cloned has to be unmounted. Software RAID/fake RAID/firmware RAID is not supported by default. It's can be done manually only. Due to the image format limitation, the image can not be explored or mounted. You can _NOT_ recovery single file from the image. However, you still have workaround to make it, read this. Recovery Clonezilla live with multiple CDs or DVDs is not implemented yet. Now all the files have to be in one CD or DVD if you choose to create the recovery iso file.

He is the head of a very big game distribution / development company. Gameing and office compatiability are two of the big things that keeps Windows popular / successful. If he started to concentrate on linux, it would give it a big popularity boost! My Girlfriend / Sister / Mom knows nothing about him either

What you have to remeber, is that address range exists outside of the globaly registerable address'es. Lots of different people do different things with them on different networks / subnets. They wont necessarily follow port conventions that are used on the wider web. Sorry If you already knew that, its not completely clear from your post I doubt its anything directly nefarious! Why not have a look with wireshark or something?

Could you give a bit more information about the hardware system specs attributed to each of those results?

The only worries I have when upgrading any linux distro are normally related to hardware drivers, normally ones for my wifi and video card. If you are not using them (I think ubuntu makes it pretty clear if you are) then you normally shouldn’t worry about upgrading to the latest supported release. Now If Mr Valve / Steam (Gabe) would actually get behind his support for Linux, I wouldn’t have any reason to use windows at all

I use the talk to text function on my android tab quite a bit. It does work best however, when i speak in an American accent. Its not a problem, but it sometimes gets me some strange looks on the underground in London I doubt its a perfect accent either!

I find it so amuseingly ironic, that the closest most users (inculdeing me) get to acheiveing their advertised speeds is via things like newsgroups and p2p. They being 2 of the transport mechanisms that get aggresively bandwith profiled the most. I realise there are masses of factors that influence this, but I worry about the internet and the growing prevalnce of level 2 networks. People like things to work nice, and for the most part in my experiance dont really know / care about how thats acheived.

First and formost, thanks for a brilliant website! Ive often mused about the speedtest sites and how pointless they are. Not just from the blatant biased reports they offer, but also beacuse peoples perception of internet performace is so rarely corrolated with their advertised connection speeds and attainable bandwith I thumbed up your post in the FAQ section on why you do this and take a hit for it! Have you considered adding a flattr button to your website? What I would really love though, would be some more servers based in other parts of the world. I realise this might be problematic in some instances, but I would be most interested in seeing that! Keep up the good work!