Slow Ad-Hoc - 2 machines

[kitesurf]

Hey everyone. I have only just got my teeth sunken into the world of wireless - it's taken me 2 weeks playing around to finally get my desktop and laptop to talk to each other.

Originally I had tried to use Bluetooth - but later discovered that this really is not suitable for networking and decided to go the Wi-Fi route. Anyhow - last night was my lucky night and finally had them both talking to each other and being able to share the net connection on the desktop and it being accessible from the laptop! Wicked!

But it seems that file sharing between the two machines is really slow. Net access is great - I don't notice any difference between the two. Hardware is a USB Actiontec NIC on the desktop and PCMCIA Actiontec NIC on the laptop. Both machines running Win XP. I've got the laptop getting it's IP address from the desktop via DHCP - whatever that means - I used Window's wizard to set up a small or home network on both machines. On the laptop it created a Bridged Connection in the network connections?? Desktop is set to 192.168.0.1 and has ICS enabled.

So really my question is why the slow file access. I mean - it's really slow. Both machines are set up for 64Bit WEP. I've opted out of Windows managing my wireless network and using the software that came with the Actiontec products.

Does anyone else use the same kind of hardware and how are they set up? Do you also have bridged connections on the client? Is there something about the set up that is going to rapidy slow the connection between the two. Note: I am using both machines almost side by side, not more than about 2 meters apart.

I was hoping to at least get about 3 or 4Mbit speeds between the two machines. 512 Kb net access doesn't seem slow on the client, so I guess the speed must be in excess of this.

Apologies for this long-winded post, but I'm hoping somebody is going to spot something and say - "There's your problem"..

Can you get different speeds on the wireless channels? I've got them both set up for channel 11.

ok - I'll stop - if you've managed to get through to the end of this - thanks!!

[Greenstead]

As you say, interestingly internet access via wireless card is as fast as the internet co0nnection will go.

You can expect 802.11b LAN speed ~max 3-4 Mbps without WEP. With WEP ~2-3Mbps (dependent on level of WEP). (802.11b is half duplex).

I use wireless for internet. But plug into the wired LAN for serious file transfers. Its poor on LAN.

btw - you should not have any bridged connections (its a oddity in the wizard). Delete bridged connections.