I have a simple network in my house with a laptop and a desktop pc, and no router or anything. There are two problems that I want to resolve; one is that I have a speed problem, I have winxp pro on the laptop and win98se on the desktop, and I can only transfer data from the desktop to the laptop at a high speed, because it takes like 4min to transfer a 3mb file from the laptop to the desktop. Now this is the second thing, that is something really strange. I had some mp3's on the laptop and I was testing the network speed transfering the mp3 to the desktop, but the speed was too slow, so I canceled it. Later that day I was checking some files on the desktop and I saw an mp3 that had the name of the file I had canceled, so I opened it, and it was the mp3, but at 1/4 of the song it changed to another song that was on the laptop too, and then at 1/2 it changed to some music that I had never heard, and I know each file on both laptop as desktop. So, why did the transfer "complete" if I cancled it, change to another song, and then change to some music I had never heard? By the way I'm using a 10/100 network

"then at 1/2 it changed to some music that I had never heard" Very strange situation, indeed. Are you using a media player to transfer files or something similar? You do want to use a crossover cable and TCP/IP to perform the transfer with File Sharing enabled. Then just copy the files from one Shared folder to the another folder on the other PC. If you are using the above method then I can not guess what the problem could be. Bryan

Make sure your nic card settings are set as auto for speed and duplex, this is all the low end home routers know , if you hardcode you will speed/duplex mismatches which causes errors and very slow transmissions.

Also run SCANDISK on both systems and make sure you don't have cross referenced files on one of them. Then run Scandisk in thorough mode (when you have time to kill) on both of them to make sure there are no disk drive errors. They could be slowing things down.

Also, there are known glitchs when file transfering in between win98 and winxp. Microsoft claimes that they fixed them but win 98 and win xp will never fully get along. Thers a just a glitch. Somtimes wi98 and xp will todaly not see eachother and you need to reboot both systems. Other times they will just transfer slower or transfer curupt files. if your going to do alot of transfering i recomend getting a usb flash drive. or upgradeing the 98 system to xp.