I'm getting pretty poor transfer rates with the Intel Pro 100 NIC interface (or whatever it's called). Even after updating to the lastest drives dated some time in 2005 my transfer rates is really bad.

In the Task Manager throughput usually maxes out at about 15% or at most 20%. It took 15 minutes to transfer 1GB worth of data. I had nothing running in the background on the Thinkpad or on the other PC.

The problem isn't with my other two PCs. I checked their peak transfer rates between each other and it is usually between 80% - 90% in Task Manager.

Any help is appreciated.

The only programs I've installed are MS Office, a few games, WinDVD and Bit Torrent. Bit Torrent was not running in the background.

Ooops...the original message was intended if you had Gigabit problems.

I think you need to do a bit more to break down the problem.

What are all the settings in device manager for the NIC?
- it didn't get accidentally set to force 10Mbs mode did it?
- set the packet size to max (small packets equals poor performance)

Check the link partner too, either end can mess up performance.

Small file transfers are sometimes much slower than large file transfers due to the file management, security, etc. overhead involved.

You should test using large files (ideally so large that the RAM / file system cache can't have a material impact, but this is likely to be very frustrating at low speeds; in practice you would hold off on this until you have good speeds).

Also, laptop hard drives are a fair bit slower and smaller than desktop ones. If you have a crowded laptop HD, then there's a chance that the issue is with the HD as well.

1 GB @ 15m ~ 8.8 Mb/s. Are you sure you're not using a wireless connection?...

Try using iperf measuring network performance. E.g.

server: iperf -s
client: iperf -c server -l 64k -t 21 -i 3 -r

Try using iometer to measure HD performance, locally or remotely. E.g.

http://www.infrant.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=265

I'd suggest using 64k transfers and increasing the test file size by 10, but the latter could be stressful on the laptop, so you should might not want to go that far.