How is the computer connected to the router (wired or wireless)?  If it uses a cable, try a different cable and a different port on the router to see if that is the problem.  If it uses wireless, try moving the system closer to the router and see what that does (e.g., is it radio interferrence).

The computer is connected by wireless and with WPA-PSK (full signal strength).  The new computer is already close to the router and is located where my previous computer was, which has great Internet browsing speed with XP.

 

I have searched the net for possible solutions and tried netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled and did not help.

 

My new computer came with McAfee so that was the first thing I tried uninstalling to help but did no good.

 

I suspected the wireless network card driver but have already updated it to no avail!!

 

 

Is it only certain sites, or just websites, or is it everything you download (email, ftp, etc)?

While I don't normally recommend doing so, as it doesn't really prove anything, what kind of result to you get from a "network connection speedtest" site?  Also, try running a traceroute (e.g., tracert dell.com or tracert google.com from a DOS shell (start > run > cmd)) to see if the slowdown is happening on a particular part of your network connection path.  

I have done as you asked and got the following:

 

Network connection speed test results: (I have an 8MB DSL line and get an average speed of 4MB using my XP machine).

 

808kbps download speed (101kbps transfer rate)

326kbps upload speed (40.8kbps transfer rate)

 

I have done tracert on both dell and google and added the results as jpegs to the following address

 

Trace Route Results

 

It seems any sites with images or ads take ages to load!  I even use Firefox as IE takes even longer to load pages.

 

Thanks for your patience and help thus far.

Do you get the same speed result from the other computer?

 

The traceroute doesn't seem to show any problem, so it definitely looks to be either something with the wireless connection between this computer and the router, or something with the computer itself.

 

Have you run diagnostics on the network card? If it is a Dell wireless card there are diags in the Dell Wireless Utility.  I believe the Intel ProSet software also includes diags for the Intel cards.

I think you've nailed it.  My network card was set to WPA2 so I changed it to WPA and things have literally taken off!

 

Not sure why the encryption protocol was causing the problem?

 

Thanks for all your help on this it is very much appreciated.