Someone asked me over the weekend why their downloads are always a lot slower than the speed of their internet connection. They are on a 2 meg adsl connection but said that they could only download at a maximum of 256KB/s (ish). Thing is, this is absolutely correct.
The speed of the adsl connection is given in Kb/s (Kilo Bits per Second) and the speed that Windoze reports the download going at is in KB/s (Kilo Bytes per Second). Since most people don´t even notice the capital B, let alone know what it means, so here goes. There are 8 bits in a byte so to find out how fast you should be able to download just divide your connection speed by 8. Either that or search for a large file on microsoft´s site (they always download as fast as possible on most connections) and download a bit to see how fast it is.