Windows 7 network file tranfser extremely slow

How many PC's on the Network? Make sure nobody is on your Wireless network. Have you secured your network connection? Go on to your Router's web interface see the DHCP clients. If you don't have a secure wireless connection all your neighbors might be on your wireless which will slow it down for sure.

3 PCs, 2 win 7 x64 and 1 XP SP2 as I said. The problem occurs with both wireless and hardwired clients.  I have never had WEP, I have no neighbors. I didn't change any router or network settings anyway. The network functioned flawlessly for 2 years until the problem occurred.

Can you disable the wireless and transfer from data from one computer to the other using only hardwired network connection? What speeds do you get then?

All I can see to do that is to change the wireless settings for the router. I unchecked Enable wireless router radio and Enable SSID broadcast. There is no wireless adapter connected to the client PCs. Trying a push or pull a large file again it looks to me like the transfer just stops after the bar moves about 1/20 the way across the info box. Small files transfer the same as above. The XP machine is hardwired to the router. The Win 7 laptop is hardwired to the network adapter. It seems to get worse the larger the file. Jpegs about 800k transfer fairly quickly.

Do you have a spare switch or another router? It is possible that something is wrong with the switch. I don't think all 3 of your Operating systems have gone bad. If you don't have a spare network switch or another router try resetting the router you have.

Try using the tool jperf to benchmark your current connection speed.  If jperf shows a low transfer speed, or can't run at all, you may have a failing network card or a failing port in your router.

Have you tried ping-ing all involved PC's (all PC's from all PC's involved)? Do you see something like lost packets?
Have you tried disabling firewall on PC's to see if it changes anything?
If possible, have you tried changing a wireless router?

Have you tried transferring files using FTP? Do you notice the same symptoms (slow transfer speed)?
If you would like to test it, you can try FileZila that I also personally use ( FileZila ), an open source FTP client and server.

actually the best would be to do the following:

Ping from one computer to another for a long period of time with the -t command and see the latency and packet loss

for exacmple

ping win7 -t   (where the win7 is the ip address of the windows 7 machine you got) or
ping winXP -t (where the winxp is the ip of the xp machine.)

emilgas: I pinged the Win 7 laptop, let it run for a couple minutes, I get bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128 0% loss. Same result for the XP machine.

eeroot: I tried jperf using the guide here http://linhost.info/2010/02/iperf-on-windows/
What a nightmare, it's like being stuck on a 20 year old unix box again :( I get interval=0.0-10.0 sec transfer=20.3 MBytes Bandwidth=17.0 Mbits/sec. When I disconnect the laptop, enable the wireless again on the router, and reconnect to the homegroup via the wireless adapter, I get 0.0-10.0 19.2 16.1

I also enabled WEP on the router, and now copying a 1 Gb file from the laptop runs at 1.18 Mb/sec (windows says 15 minutes). Still slower than the speeds I got before it all went to hell, but a hell of a lot faster than never completes.

Is there something I can tweak to get these speeds back to where they were? I was running network magic at the time but I am afraid to reinstall it until I get this all worked out.

What exactly did u do that u got the speed up?

Iperf is command line driven, Jperf, give you a GUI interface to work with :)

emilgas: I disconnected and reconnected the laptop from the router to the network card on the PC. I added WEP to the router, then I plugged the laptop into the router. That's it. I haven't tried taking WEP off but I suspect it won't make a difference since I never had it on since I bought the router.

Any idea how I can get anywhere int he ballpark of the speeds that the netgear is supposed to deliver?

orerockon, how many network equipment have you connected over wireless connection while you are testing this?
These days people tend to connect media servers, TV's, Smartphones etc. They all fight for the access to bandwidth over the wireless connection.
You will never get a 100% transfer rate when you have 2 or more devices hooked up on wireless. And, when you transfer files between 2 computers over the same wireless router using wireless connection, if you get close to 50% of bandwidth then you are a lucky man (not having any other device that is using wireless).
One device that negotiates (bad signal, or whatever) 1Mbit/s connection degrade bandwidth for all other devices.

I did not see the model names of equipment that you are using to be able to be more specific.

orerockon: make sure you turn off the router let it off for about a minute and turn it back on. It seems that its a router problem. According to what you are saying you gained a little bit of transfer speed and bandwidth just by unplugging and plugging back in your computer. So when you reboot your router you should see some difference too. Is your router next to some kind of a power/electrical connection? Is it getting hot?

Ricco55: I have 1 device, the laptop, on a wireless connection. I have another XP PC that is hardwired to the router. I have a Netgear Rangemax WPNT834 240 wireless router and a Netgear WNDA3100 Wireless N Dual Band USB on the laptop. I used to have Network Magic but since the problem started I reverted to a Win 7 Homegroup

Dynamic IP and automatic DNS on the router. Static MAC Address
Wireless network channel auto, Mode up to 240Mbps, WEP security, automatic authentication, 64 bit encryption strength
DHCP = DHCP client & on, Channel = 11 (P)+7 (S ), Wireless AP on, Broadcast Name on
Wireless router radio on, SSID broadcast on, fragmentation & CTS/RTS threshold 2346, Long preamble mode, Wireless interface maximum range
WAN setup =- connect automatically, MTU size 1500
LAN TCP/IP RIP direction none, RIP Version disabled, use router as DHCP server
Allow remote access everyone, port number 8080
UPnP on Advertisement period 30 min, time to live 4

Is there anything else that would help you?

emilgas: the router is a few feet from a power strip and the PC and is not even warm. After turning it off for a couple minutes & back on, I get 1.46 Mb/sec pulling a 5 Mb file with the laptop in wireless mode, and now get a crappy 576k/sec when the laptop is hardwired to the router pushing the same file. Pulling the same file from the laptop never completes. I rebooted both machines and it didn't make a difference.

So I am back to square 1 with the hardwired connection and no better with the wireless.

did you try resetting the router? I mean Hard reset using the pin button on the back side.

I tried that, first I did a factory reset from the router login, then a hard reset. Both times I restored the config that it was using (I had backed up the current configuration and just restored it from the file). No change :(

test with another router or a switch

orerockon, thanks for this detailed information.

If I read the product descriptions correctly, the router is capable to deliver 240Mbits/s and wireless card up to 300Mbit/s. One thing to note is that in the router documentation the stated compatible units (that support 240Mbit connection) are RangeMax 240 Wireless Adapters (WPNT511, WPNT121).
Can you confirm that your wireless adapter connects with at least 54Mbit/s?

This, however, does not explain why you have crappy connection when you connect laptop and desktop PC directly on a LAN interface.

If you haven't, reinstall (update) your network card drivers (Ethernet on both laptop & PC and for wireless adapter on laptop)

As it is generaly difficult to put a finger on the exact cause of the "weird network issues", I would bet that some of your network settings got corrupted. It sometimes happens that winsock or TCP/IP stack get corrupted and needs to be reset.

So, I would suggest that (if update of drivers didn't resolve the issue) you do also the following on both laptop and PC:
run cmd.exe with elevated priviledges (run as administrator)

type the following in the command prompt:

netsh winsock reset catalog
netsh int ip reset reset.log

Select allOpen in new window

Reboot your computer(s).

Your antivirus/firewall/proxy programs might need reinstall (but not neccessarily) as they usually have some network drivers for e-mail and network protection.

Check that your computers have been assigned an IP address and that they are on the same workgroup.
ping both computers

run a file transfer test.


Let us know what is the result.

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