I’m very proud of this Tech Tips because it marks a continuation of our success in keeping the episodes shorter, and also packing in more information. Check it out below.

From day one transfer speeds over the internal network weren’t good. It started at about 4.5MB/s pushing or pulling from my Vista computer. For 10/100 that’s not horrible, but it’s certainly not great. I upgraded to a gigabit router for better HD streaming and so that I could start to use a NAS device as my only storage and just use a Raptor 150GB in my computer. With the gigabit upgrade they went up to a whopping 8MB/s. I was not impressed.

Being the hardware junkie that I am, I assumed it was the hardware, ran out (well to work anyway) and bought a shiny new 8 port gigabit switch to see if that would fix the problem. Identical transfer speeds. I read all over the internet about bad Vista file copy performance and that there were some fixes, but they worked for some people and not for others, and I never really did start to make any progress until I disabled DHCP on my router and manually configured every computer in the house to use a static IP. This got speeds up to about 16MB/s pushing and 40MB/s pulling from the Vista box. That’s more like it, but still not quite there.

The problem with turning of DHCP is that I move around a lot. I take my computer to LANs, I pack my home server with me sometimes when I go away (it’s got my whole life on it), I’m frequently tweaking things, adding new PCs to the house, reformatting windows, people come over and want to use the wireless, the girlfriend goes to school and her laptop won’t connect because it’s configured to use a static IP….. etc etc etc. So that solution went out the window and I was back to 8MB/s push or pull…

Then SP1 came out and it was like a breath of fresh air. I was getting 45-55MB/s copying files to or from the home server, my songs weren’t pausing to buffer about 5 seconds into playing (before proceeding the play the rest of the song just fine – go figure), and my HD videos weren’t buffering either. Life was good. Then I moved. I’ve got my network configured the same way I did at home, and now I can’t get those speeds… Except sometimes. Every once in a while I’ll copy something and it’ll do it at 45MB/s, other times it’ll cap around 15MB/s, and other times it’s more lik 8MB/s. So basically all 3 of the different caps I’ve run into in the past are present right now.
DHCP is enabled on my router, but setting the home server and my PC to use a static IP anyway (reserved IP for their MAC addresses) seems to eliminate the 8MB/s barrier. I still have to get my roommate to upgrade to SP1 to see if that fixes the problem, but it seems to me that shouldn’t have anything to do with it unless I’m copying files to or from him. I guess it may come down to turning off DHCP again, but I’m not sure how SP1 will affect that solution.

The make this long story a little shorter: I thought Vista SP1 fixed the problem, but it turns out it only fixed it sometimes. Might be time to just buy a stupid hard drive to actually put into my computer for my files, and use the home server to back up content that I’m already storing locally…