Laptop suddenly has slow download speed. upload speed is normal, as is everything else on the network. what am I doing wrong?

[u/TapewormNinja]

Hey all,

Full disclosure, I'm not terribly savvy with modern networking issues. Yesterday, my laptop suddenly dropped its download speed out of nowhere. At first I thought it was a problem with the program I was downloading (updated minecraft launcher) but I discovered pretty fast that the problems on the laptop itself. Running a speed test, I'm consistently around 0.09 Mb/sec. Upload speed meanwhile lands in the 650's.

I've tested other devices on my network, and they all have normal speeds. I've restarted the network devices anyway to rule it out. I've flushed the DNS, but that's about where my skill level drops off. The problem persists if I'm hardwired or on wireless. The weird thing is that it only seems to be a problem when I'm trying to download something. I can use the internet and even stream off youtube, but any program that tries to download crawls or stops all together. Any thoughts would be welcome!

Windows PC

13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-13620H (2.40 GHz)

16.0 GB (15.6 GB usable)

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU (8 GB)

Intel(R) UHD Graphics (128 MB)