Transfering files across network

Psyk · 5 Oct 2006 at 20:29

There are 5 of us in the house and we need an easy way to transfer files between our computers. The built in windows networking is useless. Can't get it to work most of the time and when it does it's incredibly slow. It's a 54Mbit wireless network. Preferably it should be easy to use, since not everyone is as tech savvy as me. Any suggestions?

Psyk · 5 Oct 2006 at 21:06

Hmm well I've always found using explorer to look at network folders extremely slow and unresponsive. I suppose a direct link would fix that.

Psyk · 5 Oct 2006 at 21:11

We're students, spending money is a no-no

Psyk · 6 Oct 2006 at 01:17

lay-z-boy said:
There's your culprate.

cable 4tw (100mbps is very fast and ll gigabit even more)

I wish it was an option but the house is over 4 floors with at least one computer on each. Cables are completely impractical and I don't think the landlord would like me tearing up the walls installing cabling.

Psyk · 6 Oct 2006 at 19:16

I know that wireless has a lot of overhead and 54Mbit doesn't mean a useful 54Mbit. My housemates won't want cables going everywhere so that's out (plus they all have laptops). All but the PC right at the bottom gets a good signal. That PC is a media centre type thing, we don't use it much so if we can't get a good signal we can just use an external HD to transfer stuff to it.

Something to do with the 'Simple File Sharing' in Windows XP causes that really sluggish network access. If you have XP Pro turn it off in tools -> folder options -> view and it's the bottom option, but only in pro. You'll have to set up your network shares with passwords like you used to in Windows 2000 but that's another story and I don't know how. Pain in the ass if you ask me and MS should have sorted it for the home version.

That has helped quite a bit but I think I'm the only one with pro. At least now I can just get them to make a shared folder and I can move stuff into theirs if they want it.

Psyk · 6 Oct 2006 at 21:45

Gatsby said:
No, its as fast as the connection between the computers, so as we have a wired network it's lightning quick.

Hmm MSN seemed to be slower to send files than using shared folders. Maybe the difference is just in my head. I thought maybe msn sends the files through some server instead of a direct connection to who you're sending it to. It took about 10 minutes maybe longer, to send 300MB. Even assuming that you only get an effective 20Mbps via wifi, it should still only take about 2 minutes.