I don't really know how else to put it but at what point would the quality (or lack thereof) of a PC's components hinder it's ability to surf the web assuming connecton speed is not an object (T1 for instance). I ask this as the schools computers, which are under a T1 connection barely seem to utilize the bandwidth, and most the the time it feels like dial-up. Now I imagine this is because a ton of them are networked together but late in the afternoon I'm pretty much the only one on in the entire school and it's still bloody slow. We're talking about P2's around 233Mhz, 4MB's or vram, and probably about 96MB's or memory, not entirely sure about that figure but would that be a problem? Just wondering Update: Oh and their running 2000Pro and IE (whatever version that would be, 4?) assuming that has a lot of bearing on this.
I'm trying not to sound too cynical here. Your bottleneck at school may be the poor condition of the systems, as school systems are usually Windows PCs which are underpowered and poorly managed at best (usually crawling with heaven-knows-what). But it would take a whole lot to make any semi-modern PC behave as you are describing. Likely the problem is either network congestion or an underpowered edge router. Often you'll find that schools have shared Internet connections with other schools which bogs down during peak usage. Also prevalent is content filtering at the gateway, which is extremely resource-hungry en devour. If the router hardware isn't up to this demanding task the connection crawls. Bottom line: Public school networks are almost always mismanaged by incompetent people and underfunded so they have to make due with old hardware. It's unfortunately very typical to experience the problems you're seeing at your school.
I don't know how it is in other states, but every school I know of in Oregon has a filter at the gateway. A massive filter at that. Mismanaged networks? Try students on windows servers. Mostly 2003 server. A couple of my friends have brought their laptops to school and goofed around on the net but it is rediculously slow. I think my school has a shared connection with every school in the district. I'm not too sure about this but if not shared, they are networked somehow.
We must be lucky then, ours is well funded by the government (i think) and so our network isn't bad. Although they do still run on Windows Server and all network boot to XP with P4s. Its not great compared to what we all normally have at home (e.g. hwfs) but the net connection isn't bad. When we were on slow dial up connections at home, I used to take in a pen drive and download whatever I needed quickly and go off.
