Vista Wireless Performance Questionnaire

I am not sure about all of the answers, but I will do my best. I have the following hardware:
* winXP SP2 machine with a gigabit network port
* Vista SP1 laptop with wireless N built in and gigabit port
* Netgear GS608 8-port gigabit ethernet switch
* Netgear ADSL modem / router / wireless G, DG834G v2
* Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ firmware 4.1.4 with 1 hard drive in X-RAID

The winXP machine, the modem and the NAS are all connected to the gigabit switch via network cable.
The modem is acting as my DHCP server
The Vista laptop is connected to the modem via a wireless link - G since that is all the modem offers

With this setup the Vista connection to the NAS was so slow it was nearly useless. Explorer would regularly hang when I tried to open a folder on the NAS, it could take 60 seconds or more to open a 250k JPG file. This is a dual core laptop with 4gig of ram, the fastest one I could find in the shop 1 month ago when I purchased it.

Using Vista I copied a 121meg file from the NAS to the local hard drive. This took over 9 minutes, and for most of that time it reported 8+ hours to complete. This was reasonable since the network transfer rate was very close to zero. I went into task manager and looked at the network throughput, there was virtually none.

Interestingly after several minutes the transfer speed improved and it looks like most of the transfer was done in the last 2 minutes.

I have a shared folder on the Vista machine, so sitting on the winXP machine I copied a 113meg file from winXP to the Vista share. This took 55 seconds, over the wireless connection.

I put the laptop next to the modem (about 12 inches away) and this made no difference. I used a network cable to connect the laptop to the modem (10/100 switch) and rebooted. This fixed the problems and I got nice fast access to the NAS.

Back to wireless, the speed problems came back.

Chewbacca wrote:
1) Has MTU been changed to 1492 and running Windows Vista SP1

I changed this and it seems to have fixed the problems. Only changed an hour ago, so I need to keep an eye on this. Certainly speed is much improved, and "hangs" in Vista while it tries to access files are no longer constant.

Chewbacca wrote:
2) Model of Wireless Router and Firmware used.

Netgear ADSL modem / router / wireless G, DG834G v2
Firmware was Version 3.01.31 (UK)
I upgraded the firmware to Version 3.01.38 (UK) which made no difference

Chewbacca wrote:
3) Wireless Card Model and Firmware

Vista device manager lists "intel(R) WiFi Link 5100 AGN"
Is that what you mean?

Chewbacca wrote:
4) Connection Speed that you are seeing for Wireless Adapter. (54Mbps/24Mbps)

How do I find this? Signal strength is normally good to excellent.

Chewbacca wrote:
5) Connection Speed between ReadyNAS to Router (10/100/1000Mbps)

10/100 switch in modem / wireless access point

Chewbacca wrote:
6) Throughput from Windows XP to ReadyNAS and Vista to ReadyNAS. Both Machines at or near same location. (Read/Write MB/sec)

I copied 4 ISO files from the winXP machine to the NAS, total size 2.25gig - this took 4 minutes exactly according to stop watch.

Chewbacca wrote:
7) Throughput from Windows XP to Vista (Read/Write MB/sec)

see above

Chewbacca wrote:
8) If MTU settings were changed to 1492 and SP1 is installed, Would like a Wireshark capture when transfering data from Vista to ReadyNAS

I may try that later, I don't currently have wireshark installed anywhere.