Windows slow file sharing over wireless
Lately I’ve noticed that my Windows XP file sharing speeds have took a dump.
You know lots of people have a prejudice against wireless internet connections. That if you are using a wireless internet connection and it is downloading slow it is because it is wireless. BS! My wireless internet connection is able suck dry all of the bandwidth that my ISP gives me. Yet, my LAN transfer speeds were well below the transfer speeds that I’m capable of getting when downloading normally from the internetz.
When playing large video files over the wireless network, it would always stutter. I tried various things to help improve it. I switched my media player from Media Player Classic to Windows Media Player, since Windows Media Player has some advanced networking options. What I noticed was that Media Player Classic stutters a lot more than Windows Media Player when playing files across the network. Yea, I love MPC just as much as the next guy, but it doesn’t have any network buffering options. Yet, even with those options turned on in Windows Media Player I was still getting pausing and stuttering, but not as much as I was with MPC.
So in order to test the speeds of the file transfers across the LAN I setup an FTP server on one computer and then started downloading from my other computer. What I noticed was that at first I was consistently getting 100KBps. So I went in the router and changed some options, and sure enough D-Link’s Firewall SPI feature slowed down LAN file transfers. With SPI turned off I got 500-600KBps. I then turned it back on to see if SPI was indeed the reason for the transfer and when I turned it back on I got 200KBps. So I have reason to believe that the SPI option in the D-Link router slowed down file transfers in Windows and I have my suspicions that it not only slowed it down, but over a period of time of high usage that it actually degraded the transfer speed.