aecooper
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Terrible performance of direct cable connection
I have just setup a direct cable connection between my laptop and desktop machines, both running the same version of Win-95. Everything seems to work ok but it is terribly slow. Although I am using a serial cable I would expect it to run as fast as the DOS based INTERSVR mechanism for transfering files. Initially COM2 was set to 9600 baud but changing it to 115200 baud under the control panel didn't seem to make that much difference.
Any ideas?
Many thanks in advance.
Tony.
Any ideas?
Many thanks in advance.
Tony.
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Parallel cables transmit data simultaneously over multiple lines, making it the faster of the two connection methods. Serial cables transmit data sequentially over one pair of wires, and are slower than parallel cables.
Use a serial cable only if a parallel port is unavailable.
Use a serial cable only if a parallel port is unavailable.
ASKER
I can get perfectly acceptable transfer rates over the serial cable by using either DOS's INTERSVR or a dedicated PPP-TCP/IP connection under Linux. Both mechanisms run at 115200. Therefore the problem lies with MS-Windows 95 - hence my previous comment about a service patch etc.
You might try to set the parallel port to EPP on both machines in bios.
Zerquish absolutely hit the nail right on the head with this one. DCC is slow. Serial transmits at 1 bit at a time, parallel 8 bits at a time. If you need ultra fast access between two machines, use 2 networks cards and a cross over cable. Nothing you say will convince me that serial is fast. Nothing.
ASKER
No one is saying its fast, its just that under a decent operating system, like Linux, I can get a PPP connection that is 6-8 times faster. In fact you can increase the baud rate. MSWIN95 sets up a couple of null modems for the direct cable connection and these modems were set to 19600 (this seemed to be the bottle neck). However increasing the baud rate just made the connection more unreliable. I'll just use INTERSVR from now on - at least that will go at 115200.
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