When evaluating LAN speed with normal functional home computers. The ?speed? is a combination of the Network hardware (Hub/Switch, NIC, Cable, collision etc.), and also the computer power, the hard drive speed and status, the cache status, the software used, computer doing other computation, etc.
I've heard such rationalizations before but I've always thought they were bunk. Would anyone be satisfied if your GF4 gave half the frames per second as someone elses with the same computer setup?
McCarthy, I asked a question simliar to yours months ago but I was never able to get a satifactory answer to my problem. I ultimately solved most of it though. I'll share what I learned with you. Much of it may be irrelavent but I hope some of it helps.
I read long ago that windows 95 had some problems with networking and would simply never run to full speed on a 100mbps network. I realize that you only have a 10mbps network but the problem may be related. Also, the problem was apparently never solved in any of the version of windows 9x and was only addressed with windows NT.
You may notice that your transfer rates are a particular value when win 2k starts the transfer and is a very different value when w98 initiates the transfer. Many people have this problem and there is no solution to it! (Thanks microsoft!) I had this problem and I read on usenet that many other people have this problem too.
My own problem was like this, when transferring data from my win2k machine to win98, I would only get ~3MB/s on my 100 Mb network. I asked on this forum for some help but people gave me lame-o replies about system not being fast enough and my hard drive not being fast enough. Whatever. Last time I checked, hard drive speeds surpassed 3MB/s long, long ago. Anyway, I was hoping that migrating to Windows XP would solve the problem.
It didn't. The problem was still there. So I tried swapping my linksys network card with a Netgear network card. This worked to a degree. My speeds went up to 8MB/s. Now I thought, "I want to try super premium cards. I want gigabit ethernet!". So I tried out a generic national semiconductor based network card which I got yesterday. Keep in mind that my network switch was still only 100mbps so I wasn't expecting gigabit ethernet speeds. The gigabit nic helped even more! My network speeds were not up to 8MB/s. I expect that if I can replace my remaining 100mbps SMC nic with a better brand, I'd get even better speeds. I've read that the max theoretical speed out of 100mbps is 11.79MB/s not including the overhead of the netork protocol used by your operating system.
I've also gone online and read paper issues of pc magizine. Old issues of pc magazine showed that was a definite difference between brands of ethernet cards. Many simply did not run at max speeds. All these reviews are pretty old though because 100mbps has been around for so long. I couldn't find any 10mbps reviews. No doubt because 10mbps is so old. Any such reviews would be really unreliable anyway since all the cards reviewed would be ISA and the chipsets under scrutiny would have long since been discontinued.
I was able to find some gigabit ethernet reviews.
gigabit comparison As you can see, there was significant deviance between nics and even between switches (check of the cisco switch, it stinks.).
So given all this, I believe that most brands of NICS simply suck but most people don't notice. The only way to get a good nic is to rely on benchmarks but unfortunately there are very few benchmarks produced and older standards like 100mbps and 10mbps have no modern benchmarks available at all! And even gigabit ethernet benchmarks are beginning to be aged because none of the chipsets in the article I link are currently in production. I would recommend you buy a Intel nic because Intel scored consistantly well in both gigabit ethernet tests and the old 100 mbps tests. Unfortunately, I sense that you don't have the most money to spend so this may not be an option for you. If you want, you can have my netgear or linksys card that I tossed if you pay for shipping. Or maybe you can try some cards that your friends may have.
And lastly, this is a little off topic but while I was reseaching networking problems on usenet I discovered that there are many people that have a problem with XP and trying to browse win 9x and 2k machines. Browsing and file transfers are mind bogglingly slow. Many solutions have been proposed including registry hacks and stuff but these only help a small percentage of people. Many people seem to experience this XP networking problem but there is no fix.
I have a large post somewhere in the networking forum where I was benchmarking my SAMBA box and found out all sorts of bottlenecks... althougth not getting 10Mbit/s seems odd.
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