Networks Slow wireless file transfer?

[cdb]

What sort of transfer speed should I have between my pc and laptop using my wireless router?
I have this router http://www.belkin.com/au/p/P-F5D8231-4 and I only seem to get around 2MB transfer speed when copying large video files.

[dancingbear84]

Assuming that you have a wireless n card in the laptop should give you up to 13MB (108/8) then take into account the overhead in WiFi and other environmental factors blah blah I'd say 5 or 6 MB is reasonable. I find wireless to be poor for me so I always cable when moving large volumes of data around.
If your laptop is only 54Mb then you have 7MB maximum so after overheads and so on probably 3MB.
I'd check wireless drivers on laptop and router firmware, also move closer to the router if you can. What sort of connection has the device that you are copying to/from got?

[cdb]

According to Device manager my laptop has this card - http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/...ed-n-6235.html


My desktop is hard wired to the router. The router is about 10ft away through a wall, signal strength is excellent.

[dancingbear84]

Is the laptop windows 7? If so if you go to network and sharing centre and click the blue link wireless connection with your wireless SSID underneath it will tell you the connection speed. The machine in front of me says 54.0Mbps this will tell you the connection speed.

Latest drivers for the WiFi card are 15.3.1 according to Intel. Check in device manager what your drivers are.

Firmware version of the belkin depends on the release version of the card. Check your version has the latest firmware release.

[Pookie]

Disabling Remote Differential Compression added around 1 M/B to network transfers at home. I know it's not much but every little helps.

[cdb]

Laptop and desktop are win7 home and pro respectively.

I've installed the latest driver for the wifi card. The router was updated at the weekend.
My connection speed says 144Mb/s

Where do I find Remote Differential Compression? It not in the wifi card details.

Edited to add. Tried a transfer today and it was showing around 4Mb/s, but it's still not enough to play an HD video file without stuttering. The file plays OK if copied completely to my laptop first, so it's not my graphics card struggling.

[Pookie]

Sorry, its in programs and features - add/remove windows componants.

[dancingbear84]

Do you have any wireless g devices. If not set the router to be n only not n and g this may give you a boost. But I'm not really sure to be honest, it is purely a guess.

Edit:
I was flicking through a magazine at Sainsburys (other supermarkets are available ) that mentioned 802.11n networks using WEP or WPA security will only transmit at 54mbps, which would be around 4Mb/s transfer rate.
If it isn't already configured to be WPA2 Personal security try making that change and seeing how you get on. Click here for more info

[cdb]

I have tried hard wiring my laptop to the router to see what difference it makes and I now have full internet speed, 50Mb up from 20Mb but file transfers are still not brilliant but they're up to around 11/12MB/s.

Could something on my desktop be slowing transfers down? Looking at the properties, both network adapters have 1Gb/s settings on.

Can I connect the network cable direct to my desktop (it has 2 ports) or does it have to go via the router?

[Votick]

From where and what to are you copying files?

Sounds like somthing on the other end is letting you down on speed. E.g. The hard drive.

[cdb]

From my desktop to my laptop. It's just HD video files I wanted to watch. They were unwatchable direct over wireless. (very stuttery due to slow transfer speed)
I did abit of a search and found I could connect directly between the two computers, cutting out the modem, but it made no difference to speed.

Hard drive transfers to another hard drive in the same pc way faster than it manages to the laptop.

[cdb]

I've got my hard wired connection working at 1Gb, by conecting directly to my pc via cat6 cable, but there's no internet ths way, so I have my wireless connected at the same time. However the file transfer seems to default back to the slow wireless connection after a while unless I turn it off.
Is it possible to make the internet default to wireless and file transfer default to the cat6 cable?

[cdb]

I went and bought a new router with gigabit ethernet ports thinking it would sort me out, but no.....
PC direct to laptop can see 128MB/s transfer.
PC via router to laptop sees anything between 16 and 50MB/s. All cables cat6 and all ports gigabit ports.

Why is my new router still not fast enough? (Netgear R6300)

[dancingbear84]

Do you have access to another machine friend family etc that you could try in place of each one of your machines in turn to try and determine where the issue is? i.e. Laptop or PC

[cdb]

If I connect the laptop direct to pc I get 128MB/s, so no apparant problems with either.

It's just when there's a router in the equation things slow down.

[dancingbear84]

OK so as I understand it you have 3 cables, 2 x cat 6 standard wiring cables that you use to link the PC and the laptop to the router.
You also have a crossover cable that you use to connect the PC to the laptop directly, bypassing the router which you do not use when connecting the machines to the router? When doing this you manually assign IP addresses to each machine and then revert back to Dhcp when plunging back into the router.

If I am assuming correctly then let's look at the following:
is there any other cabling going to the router?
If you plug in both devices with cat 6 cable to the router do you still get the slow transfer speeds?
I assume that you are using 2 standard cat 6 cables and not the crossover cable that you used when directly connecting the PC and the laptop.
Are the ports on the router set to 10/100 instead of Gigabit?
Is the router running the latest firmware?
Have you tried setting the speed on all the devices to be 1000 instead of using auto negotiate?
Is there anything else plugged in that you may have forgotten about like a 10/100 switch or a hub somewhere connected to one or other devices?
Are all of the LAN drivers up to date on both machines?
I have you tried Googling the make and model of the LAN cards to see if there are any known issues with them individually or working with other.

Sorry if this sounds luke the obvious but it is a peculiar problem.

[cdb]

Originally Posted by dancingbear84

OK so as I understand it you have 3 cables, 2 x cat 6 standard wiring cables that you use to link the PC and the laptop to the router.
You also have a crossover cable that you use to connect the PC to the laptop directly, bypassing the router which you do not use when connecting the machines to the router? When doing this you manually assign IP addresses to each machine and then revert back to Dhcp when plunging back into the router.

If I am assuming correctly then let's look at the following:
is there any other cabling going to the router?
If you plug in both devices with cat 6 cable to the router do you still get the slow transfer speeds?
I assume that you are using 2 standard cat 6 cables and not the crossover cable that you used when directly connecting the PC and the laptop.
Are the ports on the router set to 10/100 instead of Gigabit?
Is the router running the latest firmware?
Have you tried setting the speed on all the devices to be 1000 instead of using auto negotiate?
Is there anything else plugged in that you may have forgotten about like a 10/100 switch or a hub somewhere connected to one or other devices?
Are all of the LAN drivers up to date on both machines?
I have you tried Googling the make and model of the LAN cards to see if there are any known issues with them individually or working with other.

Sorry if this sounds luke the obvious but it is a peculiar problem.

I have a 10m cat 6 cable from the laptop to the router and a 2m cat6 cable from the pc to the router.
I just unplug the 10m cable from the router and put it in the pc when I want to connect to it. I have no crossover cables as they are not needed these days (allegedly)
I make no software changes as I've never needed to before.


PC and Laptop ports are set to 1Gb/s (not auto), I can't find any settings for the router, but would hope it's set to 1Gb/s out of the box.
Router firmware it upto date.
I have an HDDVD machine also plugged into the router, but it's not switche on. (haven't used it in a couple of years)
Lan drivers are upto date.