And if that is the answer how come I get full transfer speeds when I disconnect the wireless network?
ETA: When I look at the properties of the ‘local area connection’ on both computers it shows “Speed: 1.0 Gbps”
I’m not a network maven but IIRC from doing this in Win 98 when you use a crossover cable it’s more than just a simple A to B transfer pipeline. You’re actually creating an Ethernet network between the two PCs. If this is the case there are probably various network parameters you need to set and manage for fastest transfer.
Re the switchover issue why does this surprise you? If the units are connected via wireless protocols I don’t think they are automatically going to disconnect and switch to Ethernet and re-connect to the cable just because the cable option comes online. Plus the cable option is not going to be the full bore standard cable connection they get if the were connected to switch. The cable is dead ended to the PCs Ethernet port.
Have you tried a switch and regular cables instead on dead ending them to each other. Your wireless router should have switch ports built in.
Probably because it is defaulting to the wireless since your default gateway and such is on the wireless router. With the wireless option down it goes for the next option.
You may wish to consider using a gigabit switch rather than a crossover. The management of it should be a little more user friendly.
Running dual networks is messy business on typical home user class machines. If someone asked me to do this I would insist on using a switch if only to create a more stable harder for the user to f-up network solution.
The configuration way to do this is to add a static route on each PC to force traffic destined for the other to use the wired network. You’d need to use the “route” command of the following form:
route -p add 192.168.0.10 192.168.0.10 IF 1
Where: -p makes the route “permanent” (otherwise, rebooting Windows clears it) 192.168.0.10 is the address of the computer you are trying to send to
IF 1 is the number of the interface you are forcing it to use (check Windows Networking to get the number of the interface)
If you are on Windows 7 (and probably Vista), you’ll need to execute the command from a command prompt “run as” Administrator. You’d also need to do the matching command on the other machine. If you mess up the parameters, you can use “route delete 192.168.0.10” to remove it (highly recommended, since you’ve made it permanent).
Before buying a crossover cable, check your network adapter. Some newer network adapters automatically “cross over” when they detect that they are connected directly to another network adapter using a regular Ethernet cable.
So it may be that if you just use a regular ethernet cable to connect them instead of a crossover? I know I read somewhere on this site that Windows 7 machines didn’t need to use a crossover. I do wonder what would happen if you did that on your machines. I haven’t used Win 7 and have only really looked at it briefly.
Well before I bought the crossover I was trying a standard gigabit cable (a very long one) and I was getting the same issues.
And the reason I don’t use the router as a switch is because it’s in another room (downstairs) It won’t be practical to route two wires all the way through the house to downstairs when the computers I’m connecting are right next to each other.
That’s a quick fix but a better solution might be to change the routing metric to prefer the LAN over the WAN. This will tell the computer which route it should prefer.
Open the properties for each connection, go into the IPv4 properties, click on the Advanced button and manually set the Interface metric.
That won’t fix the problem, because the default gateway is likely set by DHCP on his router to the wireless interface. Without thinking about it too hard, having two machines prefer each other for all traffic seems like a big slowdown. The static route solution I posted has the advantage of routing only traffic destined for the local PC across the wire, leaving all of the rest of the traffic going through the wireless adapter.
