G73JH Slow LAN and Wifi performance

Hi there,

first of all I'd like to thank all regulars of these forums as their threads countlessly helped me out with my G73JH (repasting, tweaks and so on ), however even after tried and searched everything I could on the forums and the net, I could not solve my problem:

I have a DSL net connection that goes up to 17mbps, however I can't seem to get more than 10mb/s with the atheros LAN NIC and 6mbps with the wifi card.

After updating all the drivers (chipset, lan wifi and so on) to the latest and tinkering with all possible NIC settings (flow control, task offloading...) to no avail, I tried with my gf old VAIO laptop equipped with a Marvel Yukon ethernet NIC and a Intel PRO wireless NIC: it got respectively 16mbps and 12mbps speeds...Dang even the wifi NIC on my phone gets 12mbps!

I decided to buy a Intel advanced-n centrino 6200 to check if the problem persisted at least on the wifi side. And yes it did, still 6mbps..

I'm kind of at a loss here, and was wondering if there was some windows setting you guys may think about?

Thanks for having read all of my long post, cheers

 

Look normal to me, but I am at a lost for why it would be Normal...

Are you saying no matter what you do and no matter how you connect, you stay at a speed of 10 and 6?

 

Thanks for the fast reply!

Well, yes, even though the connections seem to be working at perfectly nominal speeds (100mbps full duplex for the ethernet NIC, up to 130Mbps with the intel wifi), my real internet speeds just don't go near the full 17Mbps of my net connection even though all other hardware apart from my G73JH I used did.

 

Sorry for the following list of questions, but maybe they'll help figure out what's going on:

1. Do you have any software running in the background on the G73JH that might be hogging your bandwidth or CPU? (e.g. backup software, Steam updates, Anti-Virus, etc)
2. Did you do a clean install on either the VAIO or G73JH?
3. What router (or any other networking gear) do you have?
-Is it N capable?
-If so, how was the VAIO connected (G or N) and how is the G73JH connected (G or N)?
4. When you tested the wireless speeds of the VAIO vs. the G73JH, were they located in the same place or in different rooms?
5. When you tested the ethernet NIC, did you ensure that the wifi adapter was disabled/disconnected from your network?
6. Are you using a website for testing? Which one? I assume you have probably tested multiple destinations and at varying times?

Also, could you please edit your first post to indicate bits (b) vs. bytes (B) where necessary? It's probably pet peevish of me since I'm assuming you meant bits throughout, but it could make a big difference.

 

Well, yes, I use Comodo antivirus, however I did try once after uninstalling it, same results however. Turning everything off doesn't make any difference as well.
I even tried in safe mode with networking, same results.
About the other programs, well, nothing else really... radeonpro, comodo and that's about it.

Nope, I'm considering the clean install on the G73JH as a last resort, since I'd really like to figure out what's wrong. About the VAIO, it's my gf's, just imagine the slowest laptop on earth bloated with useless stuff ...

It's a sagem Livebox 2.0 (living in France). It's N capable (although it only uses the 2.4ghz band), not sure about the VAIO. Probably G as it's an old laptop. The G73 is N connected, tried B and G too, but no luck.

Yeah, both less than 1 meter from the access point.

Yes I did.

I only tried these two a few dozen times:
mire.ipadsl.net
degrouptest.com

Done, only using bits per second.

Thanks!

 

Does your router support QoS and, if so, has it been enabled to give priority to the VAIO?

If that's not it, then my suggestion would be to try a file transfer to another machine (preferably not the VAIO) on your home network. Choose a large enough file that will take some time and monitor the bandwidth using either the default Windows performance monitor or a free Windows gadget (the name escapes me now). If you try this test, make sure that the non-G73 computer is wired for both tests.

The goal is to figure out if the bottleneck is your machine or some other factor.

 

I can't find any option for configuring the QoS, it's a rather cheap router I'm afraid. Thus said, I never connected both the VAIO and the G73 simultaneously, so it's not really the issue.
I don't have any other machine than my G73 at the moment except my phone, so i wouldn't be able to test what you're proposing.

Anyhow, I'm almost 100% sure the problems come from the G73, and more precisely windows but certainly not the G73's NICs or my router, I could use a linux livecd now that I think about it, to be sure, and I'll report back to you.

cheers

 

The LiveCD sounds like a great way to test. I'm definitely interested in seeing how it performs.

Regarding QoS, I really doubt it is an issue, but I just wanted to check.

 

Two stabs in the dark while you're trying the LiveCD:

1) I wonder if you might have to manually tweak the MTU settings in the registry? Maybe your router isn't playing nicely with Windows' Path MTU Discovery?

2) Try this website: TestMy Broadband Speed Test It may provide some better results.

 

So I tried with the livecd (actually a tiny sized usb key with basic shell and the command line browser Lynx), and since I couldn't use those java web applets I usually run to test the network speed, I went ahead and downloaded a 700MBytes linux iso file off a french ftp server, this time using the ethernet NIC (there wasn't any driver module for the intel wifi on the linux usb key).
The results were about 1.9MBytes/sec, meaning I retrieved those 'lost' 0.7Mbytes/sec since I usually download @ 1.2Mbytes/sec on windows with this NIC...A little math.. around 50% throughput increase -> 15MBits/sec, which brings us near the levels I witnessed with the Marvell Yukon ethernet NIC on the VAIO.

So the problem lies with my windows...now, where to go?

About the MTU I disabled all dynamic RWIN calculation in windows and fixed the MTU to 1492, still no luck however :\.
(FYI, the website you proposed is located in the US, Texas. A bit far from France ! I got bad results :d)

 

Try disabling the QoS Packet Scheduler

 

Hmm, I disabled it on the NICs' properties pages, however I can't seem to stop the service as I have windows 7 home premium ..

EDIT: google'd it up and found the registry key. No changes though.