XP crawls comapared to 2000

[siftach]

In my office I work with a Windows 2000 Pro machine, and my boss works with an XP Home. His network speed is very slow comapared to my 2K machine, but I always thought it was baceause of insufficient (256MB) memory or weak (P4 1.7GHz) processor or the combination of both.

Today I installed XP Pro with SP2 on a brand new computer, P4 3GHz with 512MB RAM, and it is way slower than my machine, which is basically the same hardware only with a slower processor (P4 2GHz).

What causes XP to be so slow?

 

[Sympology]

Is it on a 2k doamain? If so there is a known issue, check out the MS Knowledge base and search for (afraid can't be more precise in bit of rush).

Stu..

Only the truly stupid believe they know everything.
Stu.. 2004

 

[siftach]

No domain, no login to anything.

 

[wolluf]

Have you turned all the eye-candy off? (system properties, advanced tab, performance button)

 

[siftach]

No, I did not turn them off, but what do they have to do with the speed of networking? There is no heavy CPU usage.

 

[linney]

If you have only just installed then the drive is likely to be in a bit of a mess from the install and would certainly benefit from running Disk Cleanup and Defragging.

FAQ779-4784 may help.

windows XP running very slow
thread779-796508

Can you give specific examples of the slowness?

 

[wolluf]

sorry - didn't notice the 'network'.

Is the network card configured properly - eg 100 full duplex (I'm assuming its a 100mbs network) - look at its properties in device manager? (if you've just clean installed XP, I would expect it to be, unless XP has a problem with the hardware - is there an updated XP driver on the manufacturer's site?)

How is the network set up? When you say slow/fast, what are you measuring - and is it connections to the same network resources?

PS - CPU & RAM don't have anything to do directly with networking speed either.

 

[linney]

No domain, no login to anything."

Is it a Standalone or Networking problem, the above comment is a bit ambiguous?

 

[siftach]

My network is very simple - I have an ADSL router that gives us (Me and my boss) our IP address. Through it we connect to a remote MySQL server with our MS Access application and I do some surfing with IE or FireFox. So there is no login to anything, except for the MySQL server when we use the application.

Sometimes I copy files from computer to computer using a simple folder sharing, sometimes I take control of my boss's computer by pcAnywhere. I can see that the communication between our computers is very slow - we use a 100mbit network and I never get a transfer over 300K/s (I should get at least 10MB/s), and I can also see that on my computer the MySQL/Access application is much faster (4-5 times faster). The same applies to the new computer I just installed with XP Pro SP2.

However, when I transfer files from my 2K computer to an XP computer, the speed goes to 10MB/s. My guess is XP has some kind of limitation on the upload speed.

 

[tomaso11]

Hi, you say "I have an ADSL router that gives us (Me and my boss) our IP address" and "I can see that the communication between our computers is very slow - we use a 100mbit network" so is that a router and a seperate ethernet network? I you were to reconfigure the router connections would your computer still be faster?

Thomas

 

[siftach]

The computers and the router are connected to the same hub. The router is not functioning as a hub or a switch, it is the gateway to the internet and the DHCP server.

 

[wolluf]

So you've got router connected to hub on the uplink side and 2 (or 3 counting new one) machines connected to the hub. If its really a hub rather than a switch, I'd suggest replacing it with a switch to see if that improves matters.

Also confused:-

'I can see that the communication between our computers is very slow' - talking about your machine & your boss's machine (2k & XP?)

But

'However, when I transfer files from my 2K computer to an XP computer, the speed goes to 10MB/s'

(2k & XP?)

XP machines should behave exactly like 2k ones as far as network speed is concerned (there can be speed issues between 9x/ME and NT/2k/XP machines, but 2k to XP should be fine unless something has been misconfigured or the physical network speed is the cause - and hubs are slower than switches, because they broadcast - swamp the network - where switches are directional. But on a small network like yours sound a bit extreme for it to be so slow).

 

[tomaso11]

I would suggest optimize each machine individually and run a benchmark test on each one. Then decide if you have one problem or a series.Quite simply XP isnt slow so the problem lies elswhere.What is the physical size of your network..are we talking adjoining offices or what? Is bandwidth shared equally have you tried swapping connections? Are all your machines using the same protocols?

Thomas

 

[siftach]

Forget about the router and the hub, they are not the problem. All the computers are in the same room conencted to the same hub, and there's definelty no need for a switch in such a small setup. If the problem was with the network setup, I would have problems transferring data both directions, not just one. If the probelm was with the router, I would have had problems with internet, not with the direct connections between the computers.

I did one more test - file transfer between the two XP computers. When transferring from the new XP Pro SP2 computer to the old XP Home SP1 computer, I got a rate of 10 MB/s. When transferring from the old to the new, I got 5 MB/s, which is still reasonable. So the problem is when an XP computer sends data to something which is not another XP computer. As wierd as it sounds, it actually makes sense that MS would do this on purpose.

 

[tomaso11]

"When transferring from the new XP Pro SP2 computer to the old XP Home SP1 computer, I got a rate of 10 MB/s. When transferring from the old to the new, I got 5 MB/s, which is still reasonable".Well its Half reasonable anyway!Did you try a direct connection between computers and have you eliminated the possibility a fault on one of your cards or cables?

Thomas

 

[siftach]

I do not have a cross linked cable, so I switched the cables between the 2K computer and the new XP Pro computer. Same speeds as before.

 

[siftach]

OK, I think I've found the problem, and I must admit it's not XP's fault. I just installed 2K on the old computer (the one which had XP Home), and I still get slow speeds on upload to the original 2K computer, so I now concluded that the fault is in the NIC driver on the original 2K machine. It uses a DAVICOM 9102/A card integrated on a SOYO P4I845PEISA board. Any ideas besides looking for a different driver?

 

[Wxguesser]

Personally I'd just install a new NIC, disable the onboard, and call it good. NIC's are cheap these days compared to spending hours looking for drivers that may or may not exist. At least that's what I would do on both of the slow machines.



Jim W.