Hello, I just bought a cheap laptop to take on a road trip I'm taking down to Baltimore to watch the Red Sox play the Orioles.

I have a two computer network at home and I added the laptop to the network. My question is the transfer speeds between the computers. The Laptop runs XP on a PIII 650, 128 MB of RAM and a 10 GB 4200 RPM hd. I know the RAM is low and I just ordered another chip so that will be 256 MB's when it arrives. The connection says it is 100 MB/s but in actual use it is incredibly slow.

For example, I just tranfered a 500 MB file between the two desktop pc's that were originally on the network and it took about 3 minutes to finish. I'm sending the same file to the laptop right now and it's taking more than 400 minutes.

Does processor speed and RAM play a role in transfer speeds between computers? Is there anything I can do to speed up transfer speeds?

I don't have any programs on the laptop other than Zone Alarm Security Suite so I know it's miniscule resources aren't being used by other programs.

Also, I'm going to install ME because XP is just too much for such an underpowered laptop.

Hi briarwood,

Just a thought, are you using the proper cable to hook your laptop to the network ?

Connecting a crossover cable on a paralel cabled network may drop your connection speed to 10 mbps instead of 100... If you are using a hub, you may be able to see that on the connection leds.

Chris

Thanks for the tip ironbender. I hadn't thought of that, alas it isn't a crossover cable though. Any other ideas? I'm stumped.

we had a bizarre issue here (at home), we had 3 computers on a network with paralel cables. When we added two more comps, another guy went here and cabled those with non-standard (I mean same connection) wiring. Then, we had 3 comps working at 100mbps full duplex, one at 100mbps half duplex and the other at 10mbps.

After re-wiring the cables properly, all computers are running at 100mbps/full duplex mode.

Chris