slow wifi transfers between pc and macbook

[krayg]

hi all, I got my first mac a few days ago, a shiny new macbook. I have it connecting to my home network via my router, A Linksys WRT54G running the sveasoft "alchemy" firmware. It works fine and there are no problems doing anything, but when i try to transfer a file from my shared folders on my pc, i seem to only get about 400kb/s transfer speeds. Now unfortunately, this is not enough to stream video from my pc to my macbook. And all my films are stored on my pc's huge hard drive(s). Anyone know what could be causing this?

Oh one more thing - my friends sony vaio laptop can stream the same films fine when he comes round my house, so it is not an issue with my pc or my router. I hope someone can help!

 

[mad jew]

The speed of your transfers is directly related to the range and reception of your network. If you're getting bad reception then your speeds are slower. So, does it improve if you move the MacBook closer to the router?

If that doesn't help, then remove the wireless security to see if it gets better. This isn't a long term solution, but rather a means to determine if that might be the problem.

 

[krayg]

The speed of your transfers is directly related to the range and reception of your network. If you're getting bad reception then your speeds are slower. So, does it improve if you move the MacBook closer to the router?

If that doesn't help, then remove the wireless security to see if it gets better. This isn't a long term solution, but rather a means to determine if that might be the problem.

I realise that the speeds depends on the range and reception of the router, but they are not the problem, I have using the wireless unsecured with no effect, and the wireless signal is perfect. As I mentioned, my friends sony vaio used in the exact same place in my house gets perfect speeds. My macbook is reporting that it is connected at 54Mbs and the signal is perfect. So does anyone know if there is anything to do with OSX that is slowing down the connection?

thanks

 

[mad jew]

Yeah, but maybe the Vaio has a better positioned antenna. What are you using to measure the reception?

 

[apfhex]

my friends sony vaio laptop can stream the same films fine when he comes round my house, so it is not an issue with my pc or my router. I hope someone can help!

What do you mean, Vaio-to-PC transfers or Viao-to-Mac transfers stream fine? Do all of these computers have 802.11g?

 

[krayg]

i mean pc to mac and pc to vaio streaming, all the videos are stored on my windows server. And yes maybe the vaio does have a better positioned antenna, but I still dont understand why the mac would have these problems. The router is only in the next room, and my walls are just internal stud walls whih would provide little signal degradation. and yes all of them are 54g.

 

[mad jew]

Are you using VLC to play these files? What sharing protocol (SMB or CIFS or whatever) are you using and are you using a DNS Server?

 

[bug]

I know what you are saying...

We have a house of powerbooks, Macs and PCs - the transfer speeds from PC to Mac are way slower than the transfer speeds of PC to PC or Mac to Mac. It doesn't really have anything to do with wifi reception (well, obviously that impacts it too, but even if that is the same), the smb client on OS X just seems a bit slow.

Actually though, accessing an SMB share on a Mac from a PC seems reasonably fast, so I think OS X's samba server is fine, it just seems like the client is a bit slow.

This has been the case for our household with 2 iBooks, 2 Powerbooks, 4 PCs, a G5 Powermac and an intel core 2 duo iMac. Even taking wifi out of the equation - a windows share from the PC read from the powermac or iMac (using a gigabit switch) is much slower than any afp Mac to Mac transfer or any standard PC to PC transfer.