LAN limited to 10 Mbps?

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riscbroker

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I just rebuilt an unused PC, motherboard is Albatron P4 M800 Pro. I've loaded XP Pro SP3 and installed chipset, audio, video and LAN drivers from the Albatron site. Everything works as expected apart from the onboard LAN, which reports 'Limited or no connectivity'. At this point the machine is in default state, ie to obtain an IP address automatically.

If I assign an IP manually then the connection works without error message but reports a speed of only 10Mbps.

Is this hardware related or a Windows issue?? I'm pretty sure this MB was working fine in a different machine not too long ago...
 
Check the properties of the network card configuration.
Under the advanced tab, there could be a configuration setting under "speed & duplex" or just "speed".

Control Panel -> Network Connections -> Right Click on network adapter -> choose properties -> next to network card click configure -> click advanced tab.

Should be there abouts.
 
ITCynic said:
Check the properties of the network card configuration.
Under the advanced tab, there could be a configuration setting under "speed & duplex" or just "speed".

Control Panel -> Network Connections -> Right Click on network adapter -> choose properties -> next to network card click configure -> click advanced tab.

Should be there abouts.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I've fiddled about there, there is is an option to select full duplex, 100 Base T and all sorts but whatever I change doesn't seem to have any effect
 
What is it connected to? Maybe an ancient 10mbps switch/hub?
 
ITCynic said:
If its not connected to anything, how are you determining the speed of the connection ? Am I missing something here ?
Click to expand...

Speed is reported by Windows without the machine being connected - one of those bubbles. You can select the notify option in the connection properties. Why it actually reports a speed when not connected is beyond me.
 
riscbroker said:
Speed is reported by Windows without the machine being connected - one of those bubbles. You can select the notify option in the connection properties. Why it actually reports a speed when not connected is beyond me.
Click to expand...

It should only report the speed when the NIC is in a connected state.
 
gregmcc said:
It should only report the speed when the NIC is in a connected state.
Click to expand...

Yes, that's what I find with my other machines here.

But.....

I just connected my laptop to the machine in question, disabled then enabled the connection on the suspect machine, and now get 100Mbps speed reported on both machines. Perhaps it's an anomaly on the Albatron board?
 
riscbroker said:
Yes, that's what I find with my other machines here.

But.....

I just connected my laptop to the machine in question, disabled then enabled the connection on the suspect machine, and now get 100Mbps speed reported on both machines. Perhaps it's an anomaly on the Albatron board?
Click to expand...

and further to this - if I unplug the cable, my laptop immediately reports network cable unplugged, the other machine continues to report 100Mbs until I disable then enable the connection, at which point it reports connected at 10Mbps (with the cable still unplugged)
 
This will probably not help you a huge amount, but ...

The speed of the network card without it being connected does not really matter. It could be 1 bit per hour and that is still acceptable: This is purely a default setting for whatever network card you are using. They usually will default to 100MB or so, but like I said, doesn't really matter.

But it HAS to do 'autonegotiation' when connected to any other network device, and here you should be getting your normal speed, i.e. 100MB / 1GB / etc. Here you can maybe try to override the settings: Try forcing something like Full Duplex/ 100MB and copy a few files to check.

It's definitely worth it to try changing the network cable as well: very often a faulty cable will cause you more heartache then you could imagine ;-) but I would suspect software / drivers 9 times out of the 10.

GL!
 
bin3 said:
This will probably not help you a huge amount, but ...

The speed of the network card without it being connected does not really matter. It could be 1 bit per hour and that is still acceptable: This is purely a default setting for whatever network card you are using. They usually will default to 100MB or so, but like I said, doesn't really matter.

But it HAS to do 'autonegotiation' when connected to any other network device, and here you should be getting your normal speed, i.e. 100MB / 1GB / etc. Here you can maybe try to override the settings: Try forcing something like Full Duplex/ 100MB and copy a few files to check.

It's definitely worth it to try changing the network cable as well: very often a faulty cable will cause you more heartache then you could imagine ;-) but I would suspect software / drivers 9 times out of the 10.

GL!
Click to expand...

Thanks bin3, it seems that the network works at the expected speed ( 100Mbps) when connected, I was just thrown by the machine claiming a connection speed of 10Mbps without a cable being plugged in......
 
I've seen this "ghost" connection issue a few times in the past, it always puzzled the hell out of me. Most of the time a driver upgrade did the trick, but a few still refused to play ball. In cases like that I just disabled onboard LAN and slapped in a cheap replacement card. I've never trusted network cards that do bizarre things like that.
 
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