File transfers without parallel




I have been a subscriber now for some 4--5 years and continue to love Australian PC World as the best all-round computer magazine to read.
I have just purchased my first laptop, a long overdue purchase as I travel frequently. I will look at various applications like Carbon Copy, PC Remote etc but for now I am just using the Win95 Direct Cable Connection.
My question is, is this supposed to be so slow? I am finding it just slightly slower than my 28800 modem at transferring files of any kind, eg a 1Mb file is taking about 14 minutes or so. I transferred a whole directory of 220Mb and it went all night -- about 9 hours! The desktop and the laptop are both P133. The Laptop is a Toshiba 510CDT.
I ran through the Wizard and found that I was using the wrong cable. I had instinctively bought a LapLink cable, and so swapped it for a Null Modem cable as per the directions, but it made no difference. The ports are configured for 115,200, but making them higher makes no difference. I've hunted around but can find no other settings that might help.
Is this the speed I am stuck with? Or can you suggest a number of things to check and/or twiddle?
- Shaughan Syme


Windows 95's Direct Cable Connection isn't really intended for high-volume file transfers, and they are always going to be slow. However, if both your portable and desktop machines are equipped with bi-directional parallel ports (and most are these days) you can speed things up considerably by using a parallel rather than serial connection.
If you need to move hundreds of megabytes of data on a regular basis, however, no amount of "twiddling" will match the speed of a fully-fledged network connection!
- Neville Clarkson

Win95's Direct Cable Connection can be used to connect a portable computer to a desktop machine via parallel or serial ports


Category: Win95, Hardware
Issue: May 1997
Pages: 152

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