. Slower evening internet speeds on Vista than XP

Hi,

My ISP is AOL and the internet speed drops from 7Mb during the day down to about 1Mb at night. That's just because AOL's like that on non-LLU. That's a different matter however.

During the day, my Vista machine and XP machines run at full speed. But during the evening, my Vista machine drops to about 0.7Mb (on average) but my XP machine tends to maintain a speed of about 1.5Mb. I know that doesn't sound like a massive difference, but when you have speeds that slow in the evening, it does make a difference. For example, iPlayer often works in the evenings on my XP machine but not my Vista machine.

I experience the issues even when both machines are connected to the router with a wire, so it's not a wireless issue. It doesn't matter what browsers I use either - it definitely seems to be an XP vs Vista thing.

Could anyone please help me sort out what might be going on? It's weird because it's only during the evening slowdown that the difference between the machines is obvious.

 

I already have - it's just evening congestion on the network that's causing the problem and it can't be sorted (so they say). But that's a different matter. What I want to sort out is why there's a difference between the XP and Vista machines - there must be a setting that's causing the difference?

 

Whenever I've done the speed tests in the evening, the only machine using the internet at that time has been the only machine using it.

The speeds during the day hit 7Mb or more and both the XP and Vista machines show those speeds. But the evening is different - e.g. 2 hours ago, my XP machine was on 3.1Mb when I tested it; my Vista machine was on 1.5Mb. It's like AOL are throttling Vista machines more than XP ones. I know that sounds ridiculous, but what other explanations are there?

It's more than just fluke - there have been numerous occasions where my Vista machine has failed to run iPlayer during evenings, so I switch to the XP machine and it runs it fine. During the day there's no difference between the two.

 

Not meaning to hijack, but my Suddenlink cable connection is the same way.
Daytime, usually around 6.7MBs.
Evening, drops down to around .65MBs-.85MBs