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Slow network with Dimension 4700 - a software problem?
Sorry for the long post. If anyone can help, I am happy to receive your suggestions!
I have a Dimension 4700 with extremely slow ethernet performance. Using the onboard ethernet connector (Intel 10/100 Pro), average throughput is at best 60KB/sec when copying large amounts of data from another PC on the LAN.
I have done quite a bit of troubleshooting already. Dell suggested re-installing the network driver and setting 10MBps half duplex. This gave the 60KB/sec average throughput mentioned above.
Using the default setting of Auto detection (which gave 100MBps full duplex, as the switch is 10/100 full duplex), throughput was only 25KB/sec average.
I installed a 10/100 3Com PCI network card and disabled the onboard ethernet. I tried copying the same files from the same PC on the LAN over the same cable but using the 3Com card. Average throughput with this adaptor was around 4,500KB/sec. Seventy five times faster! And working the way that 100MBps ethernet should. So for me that ruled out the cable, switch or LAN being the cause of the problem.
I had the original 80MB SATA drive that came with the system, and also a 160GB SATA drive that I was using as as the boot drive. The original 80GB drive didn't have any additional software on it - it was just as supplied. I booted from both of these disks and found that the network throughput was equally slow. So for me that meant that any software that I had added to the 160GB drive wasn't the problem.
Just in case the wrong driver was installed or something, I tried to update the driver over the internet using Windows update. It could not find a better match than the current driver.
At this stage I raised the network performance with Dell. They suggested that the motherboard be changed over. I agreed with them because I thought that the onboard ethernet was clearly faulty and that changing the motherboard would fix it!
Wrong! The new motherboard has exactly the same slow ethernet performance!
Now I can only think that the problem is somehow caused by incorrect configuration. Maybe there is a BIOS setting that needs to be changed, maybe the chipset driver needs to be updated, maybe the wrong ethernet driver is installed, maybe there is a BIOS update....can anyone who has read this far suggest something?
Please help!
- I have the exact same problem you are having. I believe it is the network driver, though I have not tried an updated driver yet.
Whenever searching for files over our network, the search screen would update very slowly. The window would often quit responding, everything in the search windows would redraw very slowly. This effectively rendered it unuseable.
I tried booting into safe mode with networking support and voila, worked perfect, no more slowness.
I'm not going to explain everything else I have tried. I am just telling you that it is the driver that is the problem. I'm going to check for an updated one, and if so, try it. If it doesn't work, i'll just throw a $15 nic in there and be done with it.
It is unfortunate that Dell's answer to everything is swap every part you've got and see if it works.
Take for example this computer i'm typing this on. It simply would not boot. The guy came out, replaced everything it had....except the sound card. Gave the customer a new computer, and the customer gave us this one because he thought it was junk. I removed the sound card, boom, worked, threw in a cheapy sb 16.
jmwills
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Posted September 6th, 2005 04:00