I may have done the left click drag thing. I don't have the data anymore so I can't go back and look at it.

It looks like the outage I mentioned this morning was for some work on the network and the ping times have been in the 40~50ms range to the first Sprint machine. And yes, that was the only place where the latency was flakely.

Now I'm still agonizing over the issue of increased packet loss while im downloading and plotting at the same time.

I checked another machine on the community network and there is no increase in packet loss. The difference between that one and mine is our first hops have different machines. The second hop which goes directly to Sprint is via the same machine.

When this incresed packet losses start there in NO noticeable increase in latency. Being anal retentive I'm just concerned that with the increase in packer loss my download speeds are suffering. What do you think.

And my other question was does a fast, up to date (2.4GHz) WinXP PC have much if any advantage over a much slower (300MHz) Win95 unit.

Thanks for your continued input....

Where are you seeing the packet loss? Can you post a picture (or send it to me via email)?

I think, in general, that a 2.4 ghz machine will probably have at most a very small advantage in download speed if that's the only difference. It's likely that there are other variables, though - though; Similar RAM? Same operating system? Same network settings? Same Network card? Same network cable? Same router on the other end of the network cable? Same network subnet?

There are a huge number of variables here that I think have the opportunity to affect the download speed far more than processor speed. Note that my opinion here is antecdotal, though, and I haven't personally run tests to say what affects processor speed has on download speed.

I need more data before I feel comfortable speculating on issues at play here.

- Pete