Have you tried using a wired connection to your laptop? Sure, it shouldn't have anything to do with it, but just to rule the wireless out.

Use a non-WDM driver for the network card.

I've had luck with TCP Optimizer recently. I was downloading files from the internet, not the network though. Win98se + opera 9.6 went from downloading 50 kb/s max to around 1.5 mb/s. YMMV

Look for an interrupt modulation setting in the NIC driver and disable it / set to max throughout / performance. But don't expect too much from 9x networking. It is inefficient and CPU intensive.

oerk wrote:

Have you tried using a wired connection to your laptop? Sure, it shouldn't have anything to do with it, but just to rule the wireless out.

Yes I have. It's not the wireless since it does 7-8 mb / sec in XP

elianda wrote:

Use a non-WDM driver for the network card.

and where do I get one? As a matter of fact, how can I tell if a driver is WDM or not?

joe6pack wrote:

I've had luck with TCP Optimizer recently. I was downloading files from the internet, not the network though. Win98se + opera 9.6 went from downloading 50 kb/s max to around 1.5 mb/s. YMMV

thanks, I'll look into it.

swaaye wrote:

Look for an interrupt modulation setting in the NIC driver and disable it / set to max throughout / performance. But don't expect too much from 9x networking. It is inefficient and CPU intensive.

There is no such setting in the NIC's properties page. I've allready forced 100mbps connection - no difference.

I'm surprised Pro 100 lacks an interrupt modulation setting. Did you get new drivers?

Interrupt modulation limits how much CPU time the NIC driver consumes. With Win98 and a slow CPU, I've found this is a major bottleneck for network share transfer rate.

Pro 1000 GT is pretty cheap these days and will get you a little more speed. It definitely has an interrupt modulation setting as well. It is of course even better with XP and later OSs. More offload abilities. 9x has no hardware offload support.

I have a browser that could download things at the internet limit from my home, Firefox and ie could only reach 3 - 6MBPs, this was due that I was sending the internet from my notebook to a generic swich, and then to the desktop ethernet

What revision state is Windows 98 at? I wonder if the unofficial SP and KernalEx will show some improvement.

Looks like TCP Optimizer does improve network performance. Haven't tested on my P3 yet, but on my K6-3 rig witch has a SMC Etherlink II copy speed went up from ~200-250kb / sec to 600kb/sec. Not as fast as I would have hoped, but still an improvement.

Tested my Pentium 100 on my home network:

If you just want to copy files from one machine to another you should consider using FTP. I think the poor network architecture in 98 is only a part of the problem, the other part is the implementation of the SMB protocol.
It is also possible that using NetBEUI instead of TCP/IP does result in better performance, but I'm not sure that's possible with modern Windows versions. (It can be installed manually in XP. With everything newer you'd have to use a VM.)

FTP might be a little faster but it's not dramatically so.

TCP Optimizer helps a lot with Internet downloads on 9x (and 2K/XP) but it doesn't seem to do much for SMB.

I like to use JPerf for network testing. It's a Java GUI version of IPerf. I've never tried it on Win9x but I assume it ought to work on anything that has Java.
It tests the networking performance in a more raw fashion, without the overhead of a protocol like SMB or FTP or whatever and without any disk access. It's designed to work as more of a pinpoint test on the network only and eliminating other factors. It could help narrow down whether the slowness is actually happening at the driver/hardware level.

I installed TCP Optimizer and it's quiet incredible... from 40kbyte/s to 120kbyte/s on Win98 and ISA NE2000 card. How is that possible?

TCP window scaling mostly. Win9x comes optimized for dial up modems AFAIK.

swaaye wrote:

TCP window scaling mostly. Win9x comes optimized for dial up modems AFAIK.

Ok, I didn't expect a similar difference really. I always thought that the combo ISA-old nic chipset was the problem of low speed.