I use two network cards in my Dell Inspiron 8000 (PIII-700): a 3Com 3CCFE574BT and a Linksys wireless card. With the 3Com card (which is a 10/100) I never get better than 1.4 MB/sec (about 12 Mb/sec), even when the card is in 100 Mb mode (at some point in the past the limit was about 2.5 MB/sec). At that rate, top shows my CPU utilization pegged at about 100%, even doing a simple ftp. I know the card doesn't do DMA, but that's rather slow even for a PIO transfer. These cards have been around for ages; I don't think people would have been too satisfied with 400 KB/sec saturating a 200 MHz system. On the Linksys card, I likewise never get more than about 250 KB/sec, even if the computer is right next to the WAP and the link quality is 92/92, suggesting that I'm also hitting up against a hard limit. The WAP is connected to my main system via the motherboard ethernet, which I know from other means (when I was transferring data from my previous system to the current one) has no trouble maxing out at 10 MB/sec (that ethernet does DMA). eth1 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"..." Nickname:"..." Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437GHz Access Point: 00:04:5A:CF:F3:B1 Bit Rate:11Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm Sensitivity:1/3 Retry min limit:8 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:off Link Quality:26/92 Signal level:-76 dBm Noise level:-149 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 invalid crypt:0 invalid misc:0 I'm running SuSE 7.3 on both systems, with a recompiled kernel based on kernel-source-2.4.16.SuSE-24. I'm not (or don't think I am) running a firewall or NAT on the laptop, despite what's in the module list. I've had no luck finding anything on the net. Modules that look like they should be relevant are: orinoco_cs 4352 1 orinoco 27312 0 [orinoco_cs] hermes 3200 0 [orinoco_cs orinoco] af_packet 11616 0 (autoclean) appletalk 18832 0 (autoclean) ipx 15008 0 (autoclean) ds 6384 2 [orinoco_cs] yenta_socket 8368 2 pcmcia_core 37568 0 [orinoco_cs ds yenta_socket] ipv6 124480 -1 (autoclean) iptable_nat 12560 0 (autoclean) (unused) ip_conntrack 12656 1 (autoclean) [iptable_nat] iptable_filter 1728 0 (autoclean) (unused) ip_tables 10304 4 [iptable_nat iptable_filter] Suggestions? -- Robert Krawitz <rlk@alum.mit.edu> http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/ Tall Clubs International -- http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2 Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@uunet.uu.net Project lead for Gimp Print/stp -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works." --Eric Crampton