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Why Is my computer slow on the network, but friends is speedy?

G

gamephile

Member
I just got back from my friends house for a little file swapping. I am bansished to the land of low bandwidth, while he runs around on speedy road runner... Thankfully I can go to his house and plug myself into the hub, connected to the router, connected to the modem in the house that jack built...Anyways, as a little joke he wanted to see if there was any difference in our d/l speeds. So we logged onto cnet's meter and one at a time checked our bandwidth. He came out at about 1000k/s, while I hovered at around 400k. Strange, I thought, and I began to investigate why there was such a stark difference.

Now, I know you're thinking it must be my pokey computer, however mine is even better than his. Mine is a 1.2ghz T-bird with 512 megs of ram, and a 40gig Deskstar. I am using a netgear fa310TX NIC. His computer is an athlon 850 running on an original kt133 board with 256 megs of ram and using an fa311 NIC (I believe thats the #...)

Anyways, I tried using different cables, different hub ports, even tried doing those things without my friends computer on the network..same results every time. I hit a wall of about 500k/s WHY??? Well, just to be sure, I put his nic in my computer, and my nic in his. Guess what, I still hit about 500k and he was going between 1-2000k/s! I have no idea why the hell this is happening. I know that most cable modem downloads will never reach that high, but it's the principle of the thing. Anyone have a suggestion? It would be much appreciatted as I cannot take this sudden badgering over somehow his computer beat mine....(sob)

 
philo:

Assuming there aren't interrupt/driver/mobo issues (seemed to eliminate that when you swapped cards with your buddy. good t-shooting call, BTW).

If by low bandwidth, you mean dial-up modem, and you are running a version of Windows prior to W2K, then you may be seeing the effects of a few settings that dictate how data is sent via the Internet.

Certain settings, like MTU (maximum transfer unit) and RWIN (receive window), among others, are by default optimized for dial-up connections to the Internet (since broadband really wasn't around then). Newer versions are optimized for LAN-based connections to the Internet.

It has largely to do with reducing the amount of overhead that occurs, primarly through sending larger "chunks" of data at a time.

DSLReports is an excellent site for benchmarking and troubleshooting broadband connections (not just DSL). It even has a tool available for download called "Dr. Tweak," which you can use to modify those key settings to values suggesed by DSLR's speed tests.

Of course, optimizing those settings for your machine might REALLY hurt performance when it is back on a dial-up connection. Just KIM that documenting the settings before changing them is ALWAYS a good idea.

g/l
 
😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱
color me embrassed, folks.
combine my lovely habit of reversing letters while typing with staying up too late posting, and something like that is bound to happen.

thanks for not turning me in to the mods, or I probably would have gotten a "vacation."
link should be correct now.
 
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