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search66

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Ghosting Dell Latitude D600's

I've been Ghosting for years, and am stumped.

The internal NIC is a Broadcom net Xtreme, and I've followed just about every thread I could find on Dell and Symantecs site.

In theory, I can Ghostcast properly, however, I can only xfer at about 7MB a minute... much too slow to be useful.

I've tried all of the new DOS drivers... different versions of Ghost.exe... etc.

I'm using Ghost 8 Corporate, fyi.
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eric888

are all PCs using this nic having the same xfer issue?  how many are there?  have you used another nic brand?

try a 3Com nic.  that would at least narrow it down.  3Com nics rarely let me down with ghost here at work.  
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Agreed... However, this is an on-board NIC from Dell.  I've used Ghost countless times, and have never had a problem until this issue.
i've been lazy and don't feel like making a disk for all of the different types of nics we have here, so i just pop in the 3Com 905 and i'm good to go.  all of ours come with on-board nics too, but we use any PCs we can get from HP, Dell, IBM, etc.  and our ghost boot disks seem to go bad after a while.  it's easier since we have a lot of the same type of card laying around.  my boss keeps hounding me about using a bootable usb device, but i get too many calls on my walkie talkie to fool with it.

i just mentioned that to get you over the hump and see if the throughput is any different.  this way you can narrow it down to the switch, a network cable, a specific port or the different versions of drivers.  if you get faster throughput with the 3Com, then you can rule out anything past the nic.  if you have another type of card and it's faster too (on all of the PCs), then you might be looking at a driver issue.
Are  you ghosting across ?  a hub ? a switch?  cross over cable?

What is your physical layout....?

Do you have a dock station availible?  have solved slow ghost this way
I'm using DHCP within my network.  I am using a docking station with the laptop.  I am wondering, however, about our switch (Cisco 5500).  I have the ports set to 100/Full; and when I'm booting it's at 100/Half... Is there a way to force Ghost/NIC to go to 100/Full; or would that even matter?
Ok, I found my own answer... Thanks for the suggestions.

After talking to a Dell tech, he advised me that these Gig NIC's are very finicky with switches that don't support Gigibit speeds...

By default, Ghost puts this at 100/Half... So, I went in to the protocol.ini and forced it to 100/Full.

After I did this, my speed went up to 540MB a minute.