old switch hates vista

So last week, I moved into an older building on campus in Grenada, a small island 100 miles north of Venezuela for school. I first noticed things weren't right with the network when I tried to send a file to my room mate via Skype. The file transfer was an abysmal 100kB/s! I had about 7MB/s in the new dorm (last term).

In the new dorms and library, my wired connection easily hit 35,000 kbps (almost 9MB/s) on speedtest.net for download but in this place, I can't even manage 1,000 kbps! I'm using my laptop in sig, one of my room mates has his XPS M1530 and the other has an old T41.

The one with the T41 has XP while the M1530 has Vista, like myself. Another odd thing happened, on XP, the T41 can hit 10,000 kbps on the same network. After scouring the internet we discover that changing the speed of the NIC (under advanced configuration, the M1530's NIC is by Marvell) from auto-negiotiate to full duplex 100Mb/s, the M1530 can get 35,000 kbps along with the T41 (also in full duplex mode)!

Now I try it (match all the M1530's settings) and guess what... it does nothing, I'm still capped at 1,000 kbps (actually closer to 800). From our findings, it seems that the old switch is having some protocol issues with Vista and/or our newer NICs (hence why XP could connect at a faster rate under auto-negiotiate).

So my question is what else can I try to help fix this problem? My network card is Atheros AR8121/8113/8114, I've disabled QoS Packet Scheduler, TCP/IPv6, all the checksum offloads are disabled, flowcontrol is off... I've tried disabled my AV (Avira), Windows Firewall... tech support is useless here (it's first week back to school, they're swamped...) Help me NBR!

 

anyone have any ideas?

 

*b u m p !

 

Nope, apparently not.

 

Sounds like the switch is just getting overwhelmed... as stupid simple as switches are, they're still limited by the tech they use, as far as throughput is concerned.