how to troubleshoot network speed issue in XP?

[sarta]

I installed a gigabit ethernet NIC (Zonet ZEN3301E, a 10/100/1000 PCI card) and connected it via crossover cable directly to my lenovo laptop T60 which has a known gigabit ethernet port, in which case I saw a balloon that said a 1 Gb network connection was detected.

However when I transferred a file between the 2 via windows file sharing, the speed was the same as a 100 megabit connection. How can I troubleshoot the connection to see why it is transferring data at the slower 100 megabit speed? Both systems are Windows XP.

 

[linney]

Network speed questions.

http://groups.google.com/group/micr...t5e+connection+speed&rnum=15#2592f02d0afa2d18

http://groups.google.com/group/micr...+for+networking&rnum=3&hl=en#c0134c4ecba33c02

http://groups.google.com/group/micr...n+speed+1+Gb+network+&rnum=9#088aa288383c8d6e

 

[countrypaul]

It's highly likely that the limiting factor is not the network between the two machines but more likely the harddrives.

With a 100Mbit/sec network you would see around 10MB/sec of file transfer. It is unlikely that your hard disk will exceed that other than for a very short burst.

Paul

 

[HughLerwill]

I think Paul has a good point there.

I know this is the XP forum but I have recently installed Vista and that has the advantage of reporting the transfer rate when copying files on a local hard disk. I have a 7000 rpm drive and when copying a 50MByte tree of folders from/to the local disk I get a transfer rate of between 2.5 to 3 MBytes per second on the first attempt. On a second attempt (and after deleting the first copy) I get a transfer rate in the low 5.nMB/s, I guess this is faster because the source is being read from a memory/cache.