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General discussion

Slow home network

Aug 5, 2004 8:58PM PDT

I have a problem with the speed of my 802.11b home network ...

I have 2 PCs (XP home & XP pro) linked to a wireless router which seem to give very slow file transfer - it takes 1 - 1.5 hours to transfer a 1GB file.

I had trouble getting the network connected with just TCPIP but it worked fine once I installed NetBIOS. There doesn't seem to be a problem with the signal strength (usually very high or excellent) and I don't know anything about settings, etc. which might affect the file transfer speed.

Does anyone have any ideas, or possibly some software which would help me to identify problems/bottlenecks?

Thanks.

Chris.

Discussion is locked

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It is 802.11b speed.
Aug 5, 2004 11:38PM PDT

At 802.11b speed, that's 11 megabits per seond tops. If it can't get a good signal it will slow down.

I don't see any issue here, but do see some writing is needed to see how long a file will take at 11 mbps (million bits per second).

And you don't get 11mbps if you use Explorer to do that copy. There is a lot more bytes flung about so let's try 1/2 that or 5 mbps on 1 GB of data?

At 5 mbps and 2 GB to toss (1 GB is just the file, the protocols and such almost double it), I get 2000 KB divided by 0.5 kBps (kilobytes per second) or 4,000 seconds. That's 67 minutes so that's about right.

No software will increase 802.11b speed.

Bob

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Re: Slow home network
Aug 6, 2004 12:00AM PDT

One thing I will say, do something different. You need to disable NetBios. It was designed for use on SMALL networks. It will "broadcast" information to other computers on its network, improving connection rates. Every time you access the internet with it enabled, it "broadcasts" information about your computer over THE ENTIRE INTERNET. Having a wireless is risky enough, but using Netbios with it is deadly. Anybody using the internet should not be using Netbios. (All this is from CompTia N+ certification and book).