One of my WinXP computers is experiencing major slow downs when visiting a particular website but this problem doesn't exist on other computers on the same network. I think there's a problem in my network connection between my computer and my router.
Is there a utility that i can freely use to test my network connection?
Boot up with a Live-CD and browse the same websites. If they load at the same speed as the other PC's, then you can rule out faulty hardware. It's always a good idea to rule out hardware as a first step, to avoid hitting your head against the wall in the end.
I can suggest Knoppix. Its a bit techie if you don't know it, but well worth learning IMHO, an indispensable tool for troubleshooting many issues.
You have multiple Windows XP machines on an internal network (same external IP address, I presume) and you find that one of these machines sees slower connections to one-specific external site.
If this is your exact description,
It is very likely a problem on this internal Windows XP machine.
It is unlikely to be a problem in your internal network -- because,
that should cause all connectivity to have problems.
To check your Internet connectivity in general, you could something like SpeedTest from this machine and one other that seems to work fine. But, if the problem is specifically with just one site, this would not show different results.
To verify that your internal network path is good you could 'ping' the router's internal address from this machine and one another that works fine -- to compare results.
You could also 'flood ping' to see continuity. But, again, since you are facing problems with a single site on this single internal machine, it is very likely a problem with the internal machine's software state.
To get deeper in such analysis (when you have run out of all configuration differences between this machine other working machines), you would want to take packet captures (Wireshark) on two machines while accessing the site in question and compare them to see what is going wrong with the problem machine.
I'd run "tracert" if I were you, in order to find the bottleneck.
Is it possible that there's some javascript, firewall or anti-virus configuration on one machine, but not the other, which the particular site finds hard to deal with? Kind of as Jean-Lou Dupont suggested.
Have you thought about the nature of the website itself? Is there something specific to the website that is special? I had a similar problem a white back and it was simply down to something like that. It was simply a hardware/software limitation and I had to live with it.
That's ruling out things like network faults and other configuration specific issues that may exist with that computer...
