Rediculously slow network card (.5k/s transfers)

[Keego]

I have a PCI Realtek card, it's horribly slow in Windows 98 (and ME but that sucks) I tried the latest drivers, and checked for IRQ conflicts... Nothing wrong there. Tips? It's on IRQ 10 right now, not sharing it with anything else.

 

[BDawg]

How are you measuring speed, and over what conditions?

 

[Pink0]

I had a similar problem. We had two PCs in the adpartment with a crossover cable and ICS. Both PCs had win xp. Drivers didn't seem to help and it wasn't the cable. Trial and error determined that the second nic in the host node needed to be replaced. It was fine ever since. Could be a bad nic. I didn't enjoy waiting overnight for a 700Meg ISO to transfer...heh heh

 

[KF]

I haven't a clue what your problem is. But I once had this happen to me. What happened was a ran a little program from the Internet that was supposed to "improve" your Internet speed. It changed some TCP/IP settings in the Windows registry (which is used by networking as well as the Internet). Since I seldom use the home network, I didn't associate the event. It cut my network file transfer speed from about 7 meg/sec to 500 bytes/sec. You wouldn't think a little setting could make such a difference. I eventually tracked down a place on the Internet that had a FAQ on this and a little program that fixed it.

The people in the Networking section could help you better.

 

[PCMarine]

Are you running any bandwidth intensive IDE/RAID/SCSI controllers that could be sucking up the bandwidth of the PCI bus?

 

[zephyrprime]

There is a problem where XP computers communicate really slowly with 98/ME networks. You don't mention what sort of environment you're running so this information may not be relevent to you. My second guess would be that the Nic is just bad.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: zephyrprime
There is a problem where XP computers communicate really slowly with 98/ME networks. You don't mention what sort of environment you're running so this information may not be relevent to you. My second guess would be that the Nic is just bad.

....or cable. One system at work was crawling because of a flaky cat5 cable.

 

[JackMDS]

It is very fashionable to complain about the Realtek cards. In reality millions of them work flawlessly around the globe.

NICs are dirt cheap, every week you can find a sale that gets the price to $5, and less.

CompUSA has PCI 10/100 this week for $3.99 ($9.99 - $6 rebate)

For such a price I would suggest to every one to get a spare card. Very useful to determine the culprit in so called "Slow Transfer".

 

[jrichrds]

I saw Hawking 10/100 NICs advertised at Fry's for $2.99, no rebate. They sure are cheap these days. 🙂

 

[Keego]

This card was cheap ($9 after rebate) But I bought it to *solve* the problem with another nic 🙂

It's slow on file sharing with XP machines, and with the internet (downloading, .5k/s) through a router. It gets an IP fine and everything. The drivers aren't that old, but I can't get new ones due to the speeds. It randomly disconnects. I'd blame the cable but it's pretty new and was working good for a while. I'll swap it out and see what happens.

 

[Keego]

Originally posted by: PCMarine
Are you running any bandwidth intensive IDE/RAID/SCSI controllers that could be sucking up the bandwidth of the PCI bus?

No.

 

[CraigRT]

I had the same problem with a Linksys hub... like we're talking 1k/sec or less on a 100mbit line... replaced the hub with a 3com and all back to normal.. i have no idea why that happens sometimes, but to ME, it'd sound like the card is just faulty. I'd grab another.