poor network utilization

[Malone]

After much time and effort I have got my XP desktop, XP laptop and another two computers (98SE and 95) all talking with each other using wireless USB and PCMCIA cards and a wireless access point.

But it is so slow! Network utilization peaks at 5% and is more often nearer 1%. All my wireless adaptors are close to each other, signal strengths and link quality are both 100% and I don't have any encryption.

I have tried lots of different settings and removing fire walls etc and but nothing seems to work. Surely with an 11MB/s link I should expect a transfer rate of better than 100KB/s?

The only thing I can establish is that when I ping between the different machines there seem to be a lot of timeouts. And when I open My Network Places it seems to take a long time to find the shared folders.

Has anyone got any tips on how to improve things?

 

[Krusty]

Hi Malone,

Having been down the same path I had the same issue though I'm using three
P.C.s running XP (Home & Pro). It took many weeks to resolve the issues.

The thing I found was causing your same problem was a setting in the
wireless card settings in the notebook (Sony Vaio), I eventually found that
the "Preamble Mode" had to be set at "Long"? I have no idea why as the
router preamble is set at "Short", Anyway if it was set "Auto" or "Short"
the data rate initially started at around 30% to 50% but dropped to under 1%
after a few seconds & remained there!

I may stand corrected but I think you will find that the 11Meg is a misnomer
as I did countless tests with transfers (from 10Meg to 1.3Gig) with around
40% network utilisation actually, this actually equates to around 480kb per
second!!! For instance a 5Meg file takes 1Min 50Sec to transfer at an
average of 40%.

My advice would be to experiment with your network card settings to see if
this improves things! I did find that Long preamble as opposed to short in
the router reduced the utilization from an average 40% - 45% to 30% - 35%.


After much time and effort I have got my XP desktop, XP laptop and another
two computers (98SE and 95) all talking with each other using wireless USB
and PCMCIA cards and a wireless access point.

But it is so slow! Network utilization peaks at 5% and is more often nearer
1%. All my wireless adaptors are close to each other, signal strengths and
link quality are both 100% and I don't have any encryption.

I have tried lots of different settings and removing fire walls etc and but
nothing seems to work. Surely with an 11MB/s link I should expect a transfer
rate of better than 100KB/s?

The only thing I can establish is that when I ping between the different
machines there seem to be a lot of timeouts. And when I open My Network
Places it seems to take a long time to find the shared folders.

Has anyone got any tips on how to improve things?

 

[Malone]

Thanks Krusty, but that didn't work for me. I tried all cominations of preamble mode settings without any significant improvement.

Can anyone suggest any diagnostic tools that may help me understand what is going on?

Malone