I recently bought a brand spanking new IBM Thinkpad R32 P4 1.6GHZ 256RAM and all is fine and great. However when connecting to the network at the office it is sloooooww when trying to access the public servers and other network drives. It is using a LAN ethernet connection and internet is ADSL which is fine. However reading other network drives is a pain and my older desktop with a PIII is damn quicker.
I can't figure it out. If anyone can help me out and provide a solution I'll offer my girlfriend up as reward...

Okay, those in the know, what's your diagnosis?

 

Have you gone to IBM's site and downloaded the latest Ethernet drivers?

Also - are you on a 10/100 network segment? Most Ethernet cards are set to autonegotiate. You might try setting it to 100Mbit (vs. 10/100) & full duplex. I've seen this as a cause of slowness in some networks.

 

Are you connecting to the network across the internet? If you are this opens up a whole other set of possibilities.

 

I'm assuming it is browsing Windows Network Neighborhood that is slow for you, but internet surfing is fine?

If so, trying disabling unused protocols on your adaptor such as IPX, NetBEUI, etc. You can do this in Network Connections -> adaptor -> properties in Win 2000 (dunno what OS you're running).

And if you have more than one network card in your laptop, try disabling Microsoft Networks protocols on those.

 

I actually ran into this last week on my work's network.
Turned out that I needed to switch my network card to half duplex, seems that full duplex was busying out the ports...

 

This is a toughy not knowing all the details of you LAN. It could be all sorts of things, but the one that comes to mind is that you might have a personal firewall enabled (software). Windows XP has this functionality built in and it may be enabled or you might have a third party software installed.

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by DaveZ
[B]Have you gone to IBM's site and downloaded the latest Ethernet drivers?

 

thanks for everyone's help I downloaded the latest ethernet driver for XP from IBM web site but then even slower??!! Couldn't even acess my Outlook without waiting for yonks. then I decided to switch desks and changed the LAN cable connection to a different line..... now everything is perfect!!! seems it was the actual network cable to the server hub is stuffed. and just as i'm typing now my Outlook has inexplicably crashed.... oh well, can't win them all...... and by the way, I hate Microsoft

 

Darn, I should have known. That blasted physical layer gets you every time! Glad you found the problem.

You might let your LAN admin know that there is a problem, he will probably want to repair it.

Bob