Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2002 10:23:12 -0500 From: "Charles R. Anderson" <cra@wpi.edu> Using FTP to check the speed of the network is not a great idea, especially on slow laptop disks. You could be running into the limitations of your disk subsystem. There is a program called ttcp which will test TCP performance with nothing else involved. My laptop disk is fast enough (it's an IBM 32 GB 5400 RPM device); the disk streaming bandwidth (writing to a file) is in excess of 10 MB/sec. The disk on my main system is a SCSI disk that benchmarks at
30 MB/sec.
Are those card 16-bit PCMCIA, or 32-bit Cardbus? If they are 16-bit, you are probably maxing out the bus. 16-bit PCMCIA is no better than the old ISA bus in terms of speed. 32-bit Cardbus is like PCI. The wired card is 16 bit. I don't know about the wireless Linksys; I suspect that it is also. For the 10/100 card, check the settings to be sure that both ends of the link are operating at the same duplex. If you are connecting to a repeater (hub, not a switch) you must be using half duplex. If you are connecting to a switch, then the card has to be configured for the same duplex as the switch or you will have horrible performance. Alternatively, the card and the switch can be configured for autonegotiation, so they will both agree on the "best" settings that they both support. Unfortunately, autonegotiation is sometimes buggy and sometimes doesn't work right between different vendor's devices. This is more of a problem with older network devices. I'll look into that. Thanks. -- 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