Realtek netcard help

[omniphil]

I have an Abit AW9D mobo with the realtek 8168 gigabit net card built in. My machine (and the others in the house) are plugged into a netgear gigabit switch, The switch plugs into a Watchguard firewall. The firewall plugs into a cable modem (motorola surfboard 4220). My cable service is 16mbs.

My machine downloads from the internet at about 5.5mbs (using various internet speed test utils) All of the other machines in the house download at 16mbs.

If I reset the cable modem, or turn off, then on the netcard in my machines bios. It will download at 16mbs, like all the other machines. As soon as I turn my machine off, and then back on, it goes back to 5.5mbs, and stays that way after any number of future reboots.

My question is why?

I have reloaded a fresh copy of windows XP, that didn't help.
I have made sure I had the latest mobo bios.
I went to realtek's website and got the latest drivers and uninstalled the old ones, then installed fresh drivers.

Everytime the same thing happens... If I reset the cable modem, it works at full speed as long as I dont turn my machine off. It will stay at full speed for days if the machine is left on. Turn off the machine and full speed goes away.

I have tried connecting my machine directly to the cable modem to eliminate the internal network, exactly the same thing happens. If I connect any other machine in the house to the cable modem directly its works at full speed all the time no matter how many reboots.

If I transfer files to another machine on the internal gigabit network, I get transfer speeds of over 250mbs, So the network card can transfer data as fast as needed.

I did put in another PCI netgear gigabit netcard and that did correct the problem, however my mobo only has 1 pci slot and I use and Audigy 2 normally. Otherwise I'd leave the pci netcard in there and just disable the onboard.

But the on board does work after cable modem reboot, and it can transfer data fast to other computers internally, So I figure it can't be all that broken? Not sure Abit will rma this is it only has issue with the cable modem speeds.

Maybe some weird compatibility with the cable modem? Maybe some odd driver setting? I've tried messing with jumbo frames, default links speeds, and all the settings in the driver. Nothing changes the behavior...

What do you guys think? Wierd?

 

[robmurphy]

Try using wireshark/ethereal to trace whats going one. Do a trace on one of the other machines as well, and compare them.

Could you have some malware messing about trying to get connected?

Rob Murphy

 

[omniphil]

The machine is a clean XP install, Not much running on it.

Here's something strange... I installed vmware server on it yesterday and then made a windows vista virtual machine. Used bridged networking. The vista machine runs at full speed too, lol.

Next I think I'll make a XP virtual machine and see if its and XP driver issue.

Very weird...

 

[cross6]

Did you install anything like a third party firewall? Did you try DL'ing drivers for that chip straight from Realtek? The drivers provided by mobo companies are usually horribly out of date.

 

[omniphil]

There's no firewall or anti spyware software of any kind. Windows firewall service is disabled.

I did go directly to realtek for the latest drivers, I got the same results unfortunately...

 

[robmurphy]

Try doing a trace then compare the results. Wireshark is free to download and use. You can check if anything else is going one while you are trying to download. You can also check what is going on in background.

Is the XP you are loading a different SP to the other machines? There were some changes made to the networking between SP1 and SP2.

Rob Murphy.

 

[omniphil]

I'll give the wireshark a try.

One of the other machines is server 2003, the rest are all XP SP2