What speed am I going at?

[grahamea]

Hi,

I've just setup a home network for my parents and I'm not sure that it's going at it's full speed. Maybe someone can tell me how i can tell... :confused:

2 PCs (both with 10/100 Netgear NICs) 1 Intel (?) 100 hub and 2 pieces of cat 5 cable.

One PC is Win98, the other Win Me and they seem to be going slow - 400Mb in 1h 20min. The hub gets _loads_ of collisions (ie. flickering all the time).

Could it be a faulty card/hub/cable?

Oh, I got my Dad to do a ping on both PCs and both ping at 0ms.

So, does anyone know how I can tell what speed they're working at? Can you point me in the direction of a util?

Cheers,

Sandy :)

[DiskDoc]

Originally posted by Sandy Beach:
Hi,

I've just setup a home network for my parents and I'm not sure that it's going at it's full speed. Maybe someone can tell me how i can tell... :confused:

2 PCs (both with 10/100 Netgear NICs) 1 Intel (?) 100 hub and 2 pieces of cat 5 cable.

One PC is Win98, the other Win Me and they seem to be going slow - 400Mb in 1h 20min. The hub gets _loads_ of collisions (ie. flickering all the time).

Could it be a faulty card/hub/cable?

Oh, I got my Dad to do a ping on both PCs and both ping at 0ms.

So, does anyone know how I can tell what speed they're working at? Can you point me in the direction of a util?

Cheers,

Sandy :)

That is extremely slow. You can try to reconfigure them (i guess) or start all over again? Meaning, reinstall the cards againa and see if you get the same results. I can transfer 400 MB's in about.. hmm I haven't checked but i'm sure i can do it in less that 2 or 3 mins.

[Matt615]

Ok I just transfered 400MB from one of my computers to the other and I used a program called netStat Live to measure the speed of the transfer. You can get netstat Live from http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/network/nsl.htm . You run the program on the computer that is recieving the file and look at the incoming part of the screen. Right click on the program and click on configure and set the program to measure speed in Bits not Bytes, so you can see how fast you network is moving in MegaBits per second.

My network setup is a little different than yours, it is NIC to NIC with CAT5 running in between them, but the 100 light is lit up on both of the NIC cards.

When I transfered the 400MB it went at an average of 12Mbps and it transfered in about 5 min and 45 seconds. Hope this helps. :D :D

[ 02-27-2001: Message edited by: Matt615 ]

[glc1]

Originally posted by Sandy Beach:
I've just setup a home network for my parents and I'm not sure that it's going at it's full speed. Maybe someone can tell me how i can tell...Check the hub's LEDs.

Originally posted by Sandy Beach:
One PC is Win98, the other Win Me and they seem to be going slow - 400Mb in 1h 20min. The hub gets _loads_ of collisions (ie. flickering all the time).That's typical of a hub. A switch will virtually eliminate collisions.

[lroberts]

It appears that your connections are running at 10 Mb/s in Half-duplex mode (5 Mb/s agregated) instead of the 100 Mb/s Full-duplex mode (200 Mb/s agregated). That's 40 times slower than what you paid your hard earned money for.

The Half-duplex is what is causing the yellow/amber lites on the switch. The yellow lites mean that the inbound and outbound traffic are coliding into one another. In Full-duplex mode, inbound and outbound data traffic have seperate lanes and do not colide with each other (Much the way our freeways are designed). This also improves data integraty.

It appears that the NWay Auto Features did not work. Such is the case when two different brand network components are connected. I suggest you manually set the settings on your NIC cards in the computers.

There should have been diskettes along with the NICs (Network Interface Cards) when you purchased them. Use it to manually set the the NICs to 100 Mb/s Full-duplex mode.

[grahamea]

Originally posted by Matt615:
<snip> [B]http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/network/nsl.htm . You run the program on the computer that is recieving the file and look at the incoming part of the screen. Right click on the program and click on configure and set the program to measure speed in Bits not Bytes, so you can see how fast you network is moving in MegaBits per second.

[B]

Thanks Matt, I'll get my Dad to dload NSL and see what it says. I tried it on my own network (that seemed to be slow) - NIC to NIC with cat5 - and it hit a max of 32Mbs!!! This I am quite happy with. ;)

Cheers,

Sandy

[grahamea]

Originally posted by LRoberts:
It appears that your connections are running at 10 Mb/s in Half-duplex mode (5 Mb/s agregated) instead of the 100 Mb/s Full-duplex mode (200 Mb/s agregated). That's 40 times slower than what you paid your hard earned money for.

The Half-duplex is what is causing the yellow/amber lites on the switch. The yellow lites mean that the inbound and outbound traffic are coliding into one another. In Full-duplex mode, inbound and outbound data traffic have seperate lanes and do not colide with each other (Much the way our freeways are designed). This also improves data integraty.

It appears that the NWay Auto Features did not work. Such is the case when two different brand network components are connected. I suggest you manually set the settings on your NIC cards in the computers.

There should have been diskettes along with the NICs (Network Interface Cards) when you purchased them. Use it to manually set the the NICs to 100 Mb/s Full-duplex mode.

L,
Matt suggested I try NSL, which I'll do first of all. If that doesn't work, I'll get Dad to run the disk that came with the cards.

Cheers,
Sandy