OK, things are getting somewhat strange.

I couldn't adjust the MTU settings on the BEFSR41 as it doesn't seem to have them. However, I found a number of reports from others in the same situation showing that the throughput of the WAN port on this particular router isn't very high. After a lot of research I settled on the Netgear WNR854T router/AP as having a very high (>80Mbit) WAN-to-LAN rate, and a reasonable cost. It also has 802.11n, which I don't need as I'm running 802.11a via an SMC AP. I ordered one yesterday, and it turned up today.

It took about half an hour to get it configured correctly (has anyone noticed how recent routers, etc, seem to be incredibly slow when updating settings compared to older ones like the BEFSR41?) and in the process I made the interesting discovery that Virgin appear to assign IP based on the MAC address of whatever is connected to the cable modem I set the MAC to be the same as the old router, to keep the tests consistent.

The end result of this was a working link, and I tried a speed test with www.speedtest.net with barely contained excitement. Would it beat my previous speed of 4.5Mbit?

It did. With 6Mbit! Damn. I tried all three windows 2000 machines connected to the router, which vary from a very old shuttle with an Athlon XP 2200 to a shiny new Pentium 4 3GHz box, and got more or less exactly the same figure with all of them. I then tried the XP laptop, out of curiosity. 15.5Mbit? What the hell?

Admittedly this is a 2GHz core2 Duo machine, pretty fast, but I wouldn't have though so much faster than the 3GHz P4 to have processor speed make that much of a difference. But I'm not sure why Win2K would be less than half the speed of XP for network transfer either. So I tried my linux dev box as well. 13.5Mbit. Even odder.

It definitely seems to be either the OS or perhaps some application on the 2000 machines that's not present on the XP or Kubuntu installations, especially as the linux box is the slowest hardware of all, being an ancient 1.33GHz Athlon. However, all the windows machines have pretty much all the same security apps, drivers for dongles, browsers, etc. I performed the test using the same version of Firefox in each case, and the results are completely repeatable.

I have also tried putting the old router back in and testing again. 4Mbit across the board, which shows THAT speed is a router issue. I have also tried setting the router MTU value on the Netgear to 1472, which is what Virgin seem to be using, and it made a very small difference to the XP connection speed (slightly faster) but had no effect on the windows 2000 speed. The obvious conclusion is that the windows 2000 installations have much slower network transfer rates than either XP or Kubuntu, but why? Anyone?

pca