Calculating your internet connection speed

A very few internet users know what the "kbps" in your internet connection speed means.

When your ISP says it is providing you with 256 kbps of internet connectivity, it means 256 kilobits per second i.e. you can download 256 kilobits (not kilobytes) of data in one second.

While our web browsers display the speed in "kilobytes per second" also abbrivated to Kbps (here the "K" is capital).

When you are downloading a file (suppose 1 MB) over a 256 kbps connection it will take :
256 Kilobits per second / 8 = 32 kilobytes per second

1 MB x 1024 = 1024 KB

therefore your 256 kbps connection will take 1024 kb data / 32 kilobytes per second of speed = 32 seconds.

Now this 32 kilobytes per second speed is eaten up by many factors resulting in relatively slower connection.

Some factors eating you your internet speed are : (there are many more)

1. Less freespace on you hard drive (specially the "temporary internet files" folder).
2. Lower system ram as compared to you HDD and CPU.
3. Microsoft reserve 20% of your available bandwidth for their own purposes (suspect for updates and interrogating your machine etc..) as explained here.

You can find resources to test the speed of your internet connection on Google Search.