I was searching the other day to try and find out why I have a slow wifi connection on some pages, and ran across this tip: http://tweaks.com/windows/37127/fix-slow-web-page-loading-on-dsl-or-any-connection/ IPV6 isn't available on all servers so disabling it for me on an older Xp system cut my connect time in half on some pages. apparently a problem in win7 & 8 too. might be similar info out there for *nix and Mac systems too. you might also have a slow DNS problem, or a number of other problems that can cause slow connect speed even if you have a decent download speed. run dnsbench to see if it's a DNS problem if the IPV6 thing doesn't work. *no promises, I may have inadvertently turned IPV6 on myself and for your system it's already off or some update fixed the problem. please make a backup/restore point first in case you somehow turn off all tcp/ip traffic!