Ok... We have a nice little network here, but we are clogged with some weird speed problems.

I will describe what we have, what we've done... tell me if you have any other ideas :)

We have:
2 D-Link, full duplex 100 mbps wake on lan cards
1 10BT ethernet card
2 (but one is used) 10/100 with support for both 10 and 100 mbps network D-link switch (8 ports). According to the switch, the 2 D-Link are on full 100 mbps duplex and the 10 BT is on asymetric 10 mbps.
We are running win 98 (tweaked) and / or RH 7.0
Now, when connecting the 2 10/100 cards together, we rarely go over 2.7 mb/sec... and we should be able to reach easily 8 mb/sec and technically 12.5 mb/sec.

We already cahnged the 2 10/100 NIC, tested the network with or without the 10 BT interracting, etc.

The next move is buying a crossover RJ45 cable to do the further testing...

Now... This should be much faster, but I have seriously no ideas of what else I could do... anyone have any ideas?

Its probally the fact that all your equipment is Dlink, I say this because I had some Dlink equipment at home, and it was slow too, so i upgraded to 3com and all was fine, dont know if your having the same problem or not, but thats just my exp, technically yes it should work.

Its most likely a mismatch between equipment and your partial full duplex setup. Try forcing all cards to half duplex (yes, half duplex), and see if that makes a difference. It could be that the hub/switch is not really full duplex or performs full duplex in a different manner to your cards. This causes your card to start talking in full duplex, then thinks there are collisions, waits for things to calm down then tries again. This causes a massive amount of latency, and you will not know the card thinks there are collisions as the hub has no idea that's what the card thinks.

If this does prove to be the case, and you must have full duplex (and who wouldn't want if they could) standardise all your equipment on one manufacturer. I would heartily recommend NetGear, who aren't the bargain basement kit people think they are.

In case you don't know... D-Link is the second biggest NIC card maker and home network equipment.

I've seen it run as fast as 3-com, except that is is 3x cheaper.

As I said, we already tried forgetting the other 10BT card, we had the same speed. Now, I have no clues on how I could 'force' my NIC to go in halfduplex mode.

I don't believe that D-Link would slow down that much a network. I mean that we barely do better than having 10 BT cards. Even if we can't reach 12.5 mb/sec (the theoretical maximum) I would believe that we can at least reach an easy 6-8 mb/sec. After all, that's only 50-75% of the top speed.

The switch is effectively full duplex, and we have 2 to test. So if it's defect, both are. It supports both simlutanous full/half duplex for 10/100mbps networks, correct packest for 10mbps and run at half duplex for 10mpbs.

With our without the 10 mbps card connected on the network changes nothing.

I am going to get a cross-over cable to test this. I don't think the NIC are involved...a s I said before, we already changed them, switched company.

I can't really afford to pay a 3-com for a _home network_... That would be wasting money :)