Now that windowsXP is released, and many of you will probably be running
it in the comming months, i'd like to provide a little tip for the 3Com series
of cards used with broadband connections.
I am going to focus on the 3Com Ethernet PCI 10/100 PCI TX NIC - more
specifically the 905B-TX card and cable 13113v2111n modem connections. This is a good card
and was a good performer in windows 2000. However in WinXP something happened,
the drivers that winXP provide for this card work but are not good at
performance. MS always has included drivers in their OS's that are intended to
just get the thing working and thats it. The MS
provided drivers are not top of the line performers, never have been and
probably never will be.
The problem with this pecific NIC and the MS drivers is that the MS drivers
default to an "Auto Select" level for the card bandwidth. This
generally in 99% of systems means that the auto select function on broadband
connetions selects 10mb full duplex. Even changing the cards properties to 10mb
half duplex doesn't help as the card still wants to default to its hardware
default at 10mb half and while this is selected the MS drivers still want to
operate at 10mb full duplex like it was connected to an internal LAN. This in
my opinion is improper for a stand alone cable connection to be treated like a
regular LAN connection.
The solution for the problem is to go to the 3Com site and get the drivers for
windows 2000 and change the drivers. After you change to the windows 2000
drivers look at the advanced tab for the card properties and you will see that
the default configuration says "Hardware default". There is a
difference between this (not just because it says it) and "Auto
Select". With Auto Select with the MS drivers the card will always select
10 MB full duplex, with "hardware Default" the card will initialize
always at the hardware default of 10 mb half duplex which is what you want for
best performance on most cable systems. The 3Com drivers will treat the
connection like it should be treated. The MS drivers will always try to treat
the connection like it was a regular LAN full duplex connection which
essentially cuts your connection speed in half.
May I confused you some by trying to explain this, sorry about that.
So the Tip 'o the day is : Try the windows 2000
drivers from the manufacturer for your NIC. They will generally perform better.
