Poor performance with a router

[max1172]

Hi everybody,

I'm a complete newbie to networking, and I'm facing a problem.
Until last week I had a small LAN, in fact the smallest you
can think of: a laptop connected to a desktop computer through
a crossover UTP cat.5 cable. The NIC cards on both computers
are 10/100 Mb and, when transferring files using Laplink, I
usually achieved a transfer speed of 30-40 MBps.
Now I've bought a D-Link DI-704P router in order to be able
to share a printer and a DSL modem. It all works well, but
the speed transfer has fallen to 3-4 MBps.
I can't understand why this happens since everything seems
to work well. Could it be because one of the two LAN cables
that connect the two computers to the router is the same, old
crossover cable that I was using in the past? I've read on the
manual that the auto-sensing LAN ports of the D-Link router can
accept both straight-through and cross-over cables, but maybe
when using a cross-over cable there is a performance hit....
although I doubt it should be so dramatic.....

Max

 

[vetplus40]

I am a networking amateur as well, but I think that using a straight through cable is preferred. I know that when I made my own Cat5 cables, I got the color orientation wrong and 10Mbps was the best I could do with my 10/100Mbps setup. After getting the color orientation correct, I got 100Mbps just fine. Hope this helps.

 

[max1172]

But the strange thing is that in the taskbar of both computers I read that
I'm connected at 100 MBps, not at 10....but then I get that undecent
transfer speed...anyway, I'll try to change the cross-over cable
with a straight-through one and see what happens.

 

[spidey07]

make sure your network cards are set for auto speed/auto duplex. That way the switch and NIC will agree on 100/full duplex.

 

[max1172]

Sorry for not replying before, but I was out of town...
You did it, the problem was the fact that I had
configured both NIC cards as 100Mb/full duplex, and
evidently the router did not like this...
Once configured as "Auto-negotiation", I'm obtaining
again 40-50 Mbps transfer speed, which is the same that
I was getting when the two computers were connected
directly through the cross-over cable.

Thank you very much to you all guys for your help

Max.