XP to Vista transfer - slow LAN speeds

[JamesD]

Hello all.

I've just built myself a pc over the weekend, and I'm wanting to transfer some files from my old pc over to it. However, through a WIRED lan setup, Vista is telling me that my transfer speed is roughly 300KB/s. When I'm downloading a file it drops to about 15KB/s. It is obviously doing something with the internet connection.

I've tried searching around the net and couldn't find anything of much use, other than to disable IPv6 and that didn't seem to improve it any. Looking at the Task Manager, the LAN speed is 100mpbs but the graph shows that its only using about 1-2% of it. Is there any way I can sort this?

Thanks for the help

[lodore]

hello james,have you got service pack 1 installed yet?
32bit or 64bit vista and what version?

[JamesD]

Yep, service pack 1 installed. Its 64bit Vista, hmmm not sure what you mean by version? Not at home currently so I can't check it either...

EDIT: the XP machine is running XP Home

[lodore]

hello again,
by version i ment for example home premium,buisness,ultimate
i guess the first thing to do is make sure you have the lastest drivers for your network card but im sure you have already tried that. for a little test have you tryed transfering some files from vista to xp to see if that is faster? then you might be able to get more information.
seems to be a known issue from a quick google search but cant really find any solutions.

[JamesD]

Oh right, d'oh! Its Vista Home Premium

[JamesD]

Nobody else has any suggestions then?

[peterb]

I'm not a Vista user, however there have been well documented reports of slow internal file transfers with Vista (from one drive to abnother - for example). As I say, not being a Vista user, I haven't taken much notice of the details, but this may (only may) be another example of the issue.

I hope someone with more direct knowledge wil be able to help you.

[Pulse]

Vista has been known to be slow for networking as there is a lot of bulk processes used just for a network connection, have you drived latest LAN and Chipset drivers for your motherboard?

[killie99]

I have the same problem and have given up trying to fix it and Ive got a gigabit lan. My fix is to have dual boot on the vista machine and boot XP when I want to move a large amount of data from my 1 vista box. XP -XP is lightening fast, bring vista into the equation and it sucks.

[JamesD]

Yeah I have the latest drivers for both motherboard, and the onboard lan. It's very annoying how two different versions of windows will cause this, lan is lan at the end of the day. Grrr I'll just have to live without if for now and carry on using my mp3 player as a method of file transfer, until I get a bus-powered hard drive! Grrr, if anybody has any further suggestions feel free to voice them - I'm sure it will help many people not just myself!

[Stringent]

I don't have any issues, running Vista x64 Ultimate with a gigabit network card. One suggestion is to try another network card and see if that works better?

[peterb]

----snip----, lan is lan at the end of the day. ----snip-----!

Yes it is - at the physical layer, but as you move up the TCP/IP wstack there are a lot more processes, fetching the files from the filestore, breaking them into packets, adding the packet headers, doing the error checking etc - and if that process is inefficient, the whole process will grind to a halt.

MS did re-write the TCP/IP stack for Vista, and there have been other reports of slow copying of files from one file system to another within the same computer.

Now none of those may be the problem in your case (as the previous poster says, he has no problems with Vista Ultimate) so a different NIC might work better. However these problems can be hard to diagnose.