Slow Data transfer speed over home network

[BillMc]

If anyone can help me with my problem, I would appreciate it. I have two computers conected together with a crossover cable between the two lan cards. One computer is a P4 running Win2k and the other is a P3 running Win98se. ICS is enabled on the P4.
Using "Linksys" lan cards. Using Zone Alarm Pro as a firewall on both computers. Both computers can access the internet and download very quickly. My problem is with data transfer between the two computers. P4 sends/moves/copies to P3 at only 150mb/minute and P3 sends/moves/copies to P4 at 350mb/minute. This is not right. I have tried the Linksys website and have contacted their tech support. I get conflicting information and no resolution to my data transfer problem. Their website says not to connect two cards directly with a crossover cable but tech support says to ignore that. I have tried switching from 100mbs to 10mbs, both full and half duplex combinations have been tried. The network is up and running but I am dissappointed about the data transfer speed between the two computers.
Is my problem with the lan cards or the fact that I am using two different versions of windows????????????
Thanks for any help
Bill

[Greenstead]

There are a variety of reasons affecting LAN communication. (And a solution may be hard to find). Most people achieve a much slower LAN transfer rate than the nominal card speed (I would be content at anything around 50%). On the internet you should get you max download cap rate - thats important.

Possible interference causing data errors - check you have good cables and they are solidly connected. Also cables should be kept away from power cables.

Windows is meant to be mainly self tuning and you should not need (but can) to adjust the parameters it uses to determine how it transfers data. It seems to me that the switching between low speed internet access and high speed lan access must give windows a problem - but its a rather black art.

You can use a monitor to watch transfer rate and see what is happening. i.e. average flow and continuous flow. I use Netstat from AnalogX. It also depends what you monitor.

One possible cause of errors is a known problem with some NICs and WIN2K. I have seen reports of dramatic improvements by modifying the interframe gap.
See here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q169789

I don't know if any of this will help you.

[BillMc]

Thanks for replying. I tried the link, but I am getting an error message that says, "that the requested article is currently not available". I will keep trying the link for the next week or so. Will also try a search of the knowledge base using some of your terms/words.
Bill

[Greenstead]

Yes it was removed from M$'s site. There were two articles on the subject.

This is an identical article for XP:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;315237