Slower boot with Ethernet

[Scottyboy99]

Hi guys

I finally got round to running a gigabit ethernet cable into my spare room where my laptop resides 99% of the time. Despite having a wireless access point running at 300 m/bits nearby I craved the greater speed of gigabit ethernet as I do quite a few large file transfers to my NAS drives. By and large it all works well but I have some issues that I have noticed.

The main thing I noticed is ever since plugging in the ethernet it slows the system boot down by a few seconds. Is this because the ethernet aswell as the wireless is now active? I'd prefer not to disable the wireless as if I do take my laptop elsewhere within my house I want it to be active straight away. I don't see any conflicts by doing so but I have noticed when ethernet is plugged in the slightly slower boot. If unplugged it is slightly faster booting again.

Also refreshing the shares under 'network' is perhaps a little less snappy with both adapters active than it was under Wifi only. Other than that all is good, I can see Windows 7 is favouring ethernet over wifi because my NAS file transfers are much faster now. In my router settings I can see both adapters are being issued IP addresses.

I do have my NAS drives mapped. They are always active / switched on but maybe they cause the slight slowing of the boot with ethernet. Under wifi only I notice under my compuer they always display with a red X unless I double click them. Under ethernet this isn't the case although one of them never reports the used/available space under my computer/explorer view until it is clicked on. Maybe its somehow associated to this.

I think the trade off in boot speed (40 seconds into windows as opposed to 30/35 ish secs) is worth it for the much faster file transfer speeds. But I am curious about this.

Many Thanks,
Wayne

 

[Scottyboy99]

It's definetely more sluggish when the ethernet cable (Cat6) is plugged in. Although file transfers are much faster under wired there's definetely some kind of perceptible latency. I unplugged it (Atheros AR8151) and re-enabled wifi again and the whole system was snappier and booted a bit quicker too. Refreshing the Network SMB shares were more or less instant runder wifi too rather than having a few seconds of the green bar building before snapping into full load. I am a bit baffled. The computer is connected to a switch fed by my router but I know the switch and router are both ok because this switch also feeds the 5 GHZ wireless access point I use for my laptop's wifi. Under the wifi conditions all is zippy. It's just the ethernet connection. So I am wondering if the cat6 cable might be dodgy, although I would of thought it would kind of be an all or nothing if it was bad & like I say the NAS file transfer rates are between 30 - 50 megabytes per second. Maybe the NIC on the laptop is playing up, perhaps new drivers might help as I still have the original shipped Dell supplied drivers? I think messing about with new drivers is the last thing I want to try as I know that can be a mission sometimes.

Any ideas? I am so hoping it's just a dodgy Cat6 cable causing the grief as that's an easy switch but would that explain the slight sluggish laptop performance. It even makes my wireless mouse cursor jump ever so slightly on very rare occassions when the ethernet is plugged in. Is Cat6 prone to interference? It's odd to say the least.

Cheers
Wayne