Home Network Problem

Molly

I have two Pc's networked together at home, A fairly good one( athlon 1000mhz 128 ram) and a pretty crap one(350mhz 128 ram), using 2 network cards. When i try to explore the crap pc form the good one it takes at least 5 minutes to open up the c drive, and thus any other folder after that, but when i open up the good pc's c drive from the crap pc its instanteous. Internet sharing also works fine across them( the crap pc is the host).

Anyone able to shed some light on my problem?

Cheers in advance

Moll

flamegrill

Check to make sure that the "crap" pc as you call it has its network card enabled in full duplex mode. however i cant see why half duplex could have caused the delay u are refering to.

How big/small is the hard disk on the old pc? i still dont think thats relavant tbh. What OS? how much ram. All i have looked for shoultnt make a huge impact on network performance. I'd try a new NIC first thou before doing anything mental. It could just be knackered, also try new cableing maybe.

Regards,

Paul

(molly teehhehehe)

Molly

128 ram in both of em, on the "crap" pc the hd is about 6 gigs with about a meg free. Good pc is win98 se crap pc is win98. Duplex mode is on auto mode.

laughing at my name is also very mean D;

Hecate

I had a similar experience to this whereby uploading data to one machine was fine, but downloading data from it was incredibly slow (modem-like speeds over a 100mbit lan). And the offending box wasnt a slow machine by any means (K62-500).

Though it might have been speed negotiation, which is usually the cause of stuff like this, but in the end I just had to pull out the nic and replace it.

Not that I'm suggesting anything that drastic as a solution; you should try setting the speed on the bad pc to 10mbits or 100mbits. Also bear in mind that Windows shares can sometimes be slow to load over a network, usually causing the client machine to hang until the data is received.

Gavin

remove any other unecessary protocols. just use tcp/ip and remove netbui. ipx/spx too unless you use it for games.

Gav

ozpass

For what it's worth.......

Very occasionally occurs with hubs + switches but is very common with home type 'crossover cable' setups......

Network cards are usually enabled by default to 'auto-sense' the connection speed for the equipment they are connecting to. They will also try to determine whether a full or half duplex is possible. Auto-sensing is pretty toss to be honest and I never use it if it's avoidable. A common scenario is as follows: one network card decides it's a good idea to work in duplex and configures itself to work as such. As it is now talking and listening on two separate channels it doesn't bother with the whole 'carrier sense' portion of ethernet and decides to talk whenever it likes. The other network card decides to be half-duplex which means it talks and listens on the same channel. The result is a mass of 'collisions' causing the half-duplex card to constantly 'back-off' the ether resulting in crap performance as it goes through the rigmarole of speed throttling until it finally gets to send its packet (when the full duplex card shuts up momentarily.

I could blather on in boring detail about this but a possible solution would be more useful, I'd imagine.

manually configure each network card thru Network neighborhood properties to be the same speed and same duplex setting.

NetBEUI is actually quite a good protocol for the setup you have, being non-routable and simple (unlike IP) and handling name resolution and such much more simply. Fewer broadcasts and such too.

seamus

Originally posted by Molly
128 ram in both of em, on the "crap" pc the hd is about 6 gigs with about a meg free.

A meg or a gig? If the HDD is almost full, some delay wouldn't surprise me.