SG Broadband Community

Newbie question...

Okay, i have four 'puters, all running XP on a home lan using a linksys dls modem/router. it's utilizing the DHCP feature on the router and my problem is with file transfer speed and efficiency. there seemed to be a lag when i transfer files... what i decided to do, not sure if this means anything, but i used the network monitor via taskmanger to see what was going on when i transfered a 700mb file. the most i can utilze is around 40% of the network and it thing that disturbs me is that it spikes a lot. is this normal? how can i really monitor the speed of files being trnasfered? is there a tweak i can use? right now, it takes around 5 minutes to transfer the 700mb file from one cumputer to the other.

thnx
silver

Are you running 10 or 100base?

I am not very familiar with XP but I will tell you what I know. First, 700mb is alot of file to download and 10mbs connection which you are probably using will take about 5 minutes. And as for the spiking, information gets passed through the network in packets, so when a large amount of packets are coming in you will see it spike because it has to read the packet and so on. Check to see what the speed of your router is and the speed of your network card. There are alot of software tweaks out there but I could not tell you which one is the best. Lets start with some basics, first check the bindings to the network card. The path to this may be different in XP so forgive me here. Goto Control Panel, then network. Find your network card in the display and click on properties, make sure that only TCP/IP is check marked. The more bindings you have the slower the network connection will be. Have you thought of using Netbeui instead of TCP/IP for LAN connection and use TCP/IP only for WAN connection because NETBeui is much faster for LAN. Let me know what you think of this idea.