In reply to:

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I'll bet it's the third one

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Time to tell some strange stories. I've had various problems with Windows and separately both a 3com 3c905 card and a Micronet 100baseT hub.

The problem with the 3com card was that although Windows recognised it, said it was working fine etc. etc. it completely failed to use it properly - a quick meter on the cables showed that it was collision city and transfers seemed to be slower than a 10baseT connection. This prevailed despite numerous reboots while drivers and card settings were changed. The exact same card ran with no problems on my two Linux boxes. I bought a cheap (CHF30, GBP12, USD19) shop branded RTL8139 which has never failed me.

The hub was a strange one - seemed to work fine and its in built meter read utilisation at about 50-75% during heavy duty file transfers which, I thought, while not perfect, was usable. The setup I had at the time was one gateway/router with three network cards (cable modem, 10baseT network and 100baseT network). This caused me some problems (which I've now probably got enough experience to solve) to the point that I went out and bought a new hub - a dual speed switch - and ripped out one of the network cards. As a side effect of this, I noticed that my network was a damn sight faster. Too much so to put down to the way the switch divvied up the packets.

So, after all that, I guess I'm saying that it's possible that the problem experienced is something to do with incompatabilities (or crappyness) in the installed equipment. So, 94Cobra, any chance of some more information? What OS and version? Tell us about the cabling (crossover, hub, switch, routed etc. etc.). Tell us about the network card and its settings. Tell us about the IP addresses, netmasks, broadcast addresses. Tell us about name resolution (if you do any).

Nick
(who's pretty chuffed with himself cos he learned how to set up a DNS server for his local machines and managed to rebuild his internet gateway with no errors in only an hour - Oooh, I do like Slackware).

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18Gb blue (now AR red) - s/n 080000299 (original queue position 8724)