Joe you can try testing from various places around the world from the link below. There is nothing wrong with 7 megs per second either unless you are downloading colossal amounts of movies. Perhaps your friend pays a higher monthly fee.

This site explains the differences and might help you understand better.

Here is a link that might be useful: Speedtest site

Comcast High-Speed Internet

Tiers of service
(download/upload speeds)

Performance: 12 Mbps/ 2 Mbps

(up to 15 Mbps/3 Mbps with PowerBoost)

Blast!®: 16 Mbps/ 2 Mbps

(up to 20 Mbps/4 Mbps with PowerBoost)

Ultra: 22 Mbps/ 5 Mbps

(up to 30 Mbps/7 Mbps with PowerBoost)

Extreme 50: 50 Mbps/ 10 Mbps

Those are the speeds Comcast offers, what tier do you have?

Operating System dosn't have much to do with Internet connection speed that's determined by the provider as shown above.

Being able to use the speed to it's full potential probably would be a factor on the type of computer, ram, processor, etc.

Some information at link also.

Here is a link that might be useful: pcpitstop

zep has it there, I am on comcast and get around 26Mbps
I have windows and linux running on it and they all test the same has no bearing really. Just depends on which tier of service you are on.

I like the testmynet tests, but also over on BBR forum there are many tests you can perform including speed

Here is a link that might be useful: test

yes i am aware of different speed options from comcast. i am not sure if friend has enhanced package. he recently bought his house and rewired it. he has a whole house network and dedicated computers for his video files and put in a simple home theater in the lower level. he has netflix and likes to stream movies and has a large collection of videos on different hard drives as well as a large disc collection. of course he has tivo and other devices. i don't think he has basic service and than would call comcast to complain about too high download speeds.

you have 2 questions in your original post, the last was is MS OS slower than linux if you mean in general as OS against OS usually linux is a faster Os as it is much less bloated so it is quite speedy and is a great candidate to be run on old computers that have trouble running windows.
I much prefer to use my linux for my dialy use, it is safer and on my system faster, I have 2 hard drives in one pc one with windows xp pro one with Mepis8 linux, so everything is the same virtually for both other than they are on different hard drives but both have the same speed rating.

I don't really understand what you are asking however about the speed, you mention his linux box getting 30 but what did his windows box get on the same connection and same speed test? are you saying there was a difference in his own house on his various computers? Or are you comparing your house and your pc to his one linux pc in his house? very different questions, need to know to understand.

last week he downloaded files at 7mb on his winxp boxes. today, he said he hit 30mb on his linux box. that is all i know. don't know if he has changed anything on his setup. should he get similar speeds on 2 different systems if the speed tests are done in a short span of time?

Ask him what plan he has, so the speeds make sense to what he is getting.

"i can only get about 7mb on my pc"

And what plan do you have?

well if the 2 machines are hooked up to the same modem and router he should get very similar speeds on both unless he has something throttling his speed on the windows box.

he should test both machines on the same test site one after the other at the same time of day to see if this is consistent if so then I would say he has a problem with the one getting the slow speed.

different test sites will give different results so it is important to test on the same site, some are restricted to slower speeds and will not give a good reading for very high speed connections.
this is an example from my test I just did at the speedtest.net

a good site to use that has great detailed info which can help diagnose problems is this one
UC Santa Cruz Web100 based Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT)
once the test is completed if you hit the more details button on it a new pop up opens with all the details and can often tell you where your problem is.

Raven, looking at your speedtest results just makes me sick with envy. I use Verizon cellular broadband, and I'm so happy when my download speeds go over 1Mb/s. Of course, my other option is either satellite, which I had for two years and discontinued, or dialup at 24Kb/s. Yeah, I think I'm green. LOL!

I went from comcast to satellite wildblue that is, I don't even want to look at my speed, I know it's slow.....

That's the one I had, Zep. It was okay for what it was. Hard rain killed the signal and my connection. Welcome to the "sticks".