People are under this false impression that they can just go buy a program that will retroactively fix any and all virii and spyware. This is a lot of times impossible. Once a virus or spyware truly infiltrates your system you most likely have to reload Windows and then load antivirus/spyware protection from scratch (like they should have all along). The Windows registry is craptastic, but it exists and as long as it does many virii and spyware will be able to prevent repair software from installing successfully. You can't really expect Symantec to log into your computer remotely and hack your registry enough to install their software and then remove all of the bad stuff for you for free. End users are idiots.

To be perfectly honest, there is probably no study out there performed by a reputable research company that can show the network stack in Linux is THIS MUCH faster than the Windows network stack. In fact, I would be willing to be the driver on the Compaq running windows for the network card is the compaq-provider driver and is rather stale, or even better the NIC may be a different revision than the one in the other compaq running Linux. Also, if the download speed test was performed in Windows first, chances are that Comcast had the files cached for a quicker download if the tests were performed back to back. There are too many variables to warrant this post even being displayed, and there are no whitepapers out there that will back this performance difference.