silver-surfer

Hi KenB. What you've said makes sense, the network cards are Realtek. The disk spin speed on the XP machine is almost certainly 5400 rpm, not sure about the new one although I know it's a Sata II. Anyway, thanks for your input.

Hi, Ok, firstly, my mistake, the xp machine has SP3. There are no USB ports used in this connection, it's purely WiFi. The laptops connect to each other via my router over a wireless link. The router supports 802.11g which, theoretically, can run at up to 54Mbps. When the two laptops were connected and, Easy Transfer running, the link speed was only 5Mbps. R.

I bought myself a new laptop running Windows 8, to replace my old laptop which has XP (SP2). I decided to use Windows Easy transfer to copy the data across from old to new, using the Wireless Network option. I have a Netgear router which supports wireless connections up to 54Mbps. Windows Easy Transfer started and informed me that the transfer would take nearly 2 hours, quite a long time I thought given there is only about 4Gb of data to be transferred. I logged on to the router, which supports SNMP and found that the link was only running at 5Mbps, this was confirmed on the Windows 8 laptop by Task Manager which showed the WiFi interface running at 5 Mbps. Does anyone have any idea why it runs so slowly? Thanks in advance. R

Here’s something that may interest you “techies” out there. Sorry about the lengthy preamble but it’s necessary. I’m using an Asrock 960GM/U3S3 FX motherboard, which has 2 x Sata 3 connectors and 4 x Sata 2, it also supports DDR3 memory (1866 OC) and up to an 8 core CPU, I’m running a 6 core AMD FX 6100. The board uses the AMD 780G chipset for the Northbridge and the SB700 for the Southbridge. To take advantage of Sata3 I recently purchased a 128GB SSD from Sandisk. Before making my purchase I checked the Sandisk website where I found the key information I needed about the products performance. According to Sandisk this device will give, and I quote, “Write speeds of up to 350 MB/s and Read speeds of up to 490MB/s” They even disclosed the software used to obtain these figures; namely ATTO Disk Benchmark and the parameters they used. These were a Transfer Size of 0.5 KB to 8192, a Total Length of 512MB and a Queue Depth of 10 I duly fitted my nice new SSD and after making sure everything was as it should be i.e. AHCI and TRIM were all working, I downloaded ATTO from the web. I ran ATTO using the same parameters used by Sandisk but the results were quite disappointing; Write speed of 260MB/s and Read speed of 370MB/s. At 128k the Read speed hit 370MB/s and there it stayed throughout the remainder of the test, likewise, the Write speed hit 260MB/s. It appeared as though the SSD had reached some sort of maximum but, I couldn’t understand what, I knew it was capable of performing better. I did some tuning in the BIOS, there is a whole section devoted to Overclocking but, I couldn’t improve the Write/Read speeds. I decided a new approach was needed so, I took my SSD to a pal whose computer has a Gigabyte motherboard (sorry, I don’t know which model). The ATTO test reported very similar results to those on my Asrock board; however, the difference with the motherboards is that the Gigabyte drives its Sata3 ports from the same bus clock as the PCIe. By default this clock runs at 100Mhz, however, its configurable. We increased the speed to 110Mhz and ATTO reported a Write speed of 290MB/s and a Read speed of 410Mb/s. We increased it again 115Mhz and the disk figures were even more impressive. OK, I thought I’ll go home and do the same on my Asrock . However, once home I discovered that my Sata ports are controlled by the Southbridge chip (SB700) and that the bus speed is fixed at 100MHz. So, my question to you techies is “why make a chip that supports Sata3 with an advertised throughput of up to 6Gbits/s and then throttle them by limiting the bus speed to a 100MHz?”

Thanks Nev. I think I can save the staff the effort; Albert was cremated and his ashes scattered near or on a New Jersey river. Richard

Must have been the wine then.

Possibly on one of the motorcycle owners club sites.

When you create a partition on a disc can you specify where it’s located? I read somewhere on the Internet that the fastest part of a mechanical HDD is the area closest to the spindle. So, in theory if I took a 500 Gb drive and created, for example, a 150 Gb partition into which I loaded my operating system and placed it close to the spindle I would get the optimum start-up speed for my computer or am I just getting confused?

I'm what is generally referred to as a Silver Surfer.....well someone has to be. I now spend my days messing about with computers, collecting and restoring old British motorcycles and eating and drinking more than the experts say is good for me; I know it's a tough life. Although I started messing about with computers over 40 years ago I by no means know all there is to know, hence the reason I'm here. Richard