[snowboarder33]

While it sounds like a hardware issue, try the tweak here, which are Windows friendly:

http://www.speedguide.net/articles/lan-tweaking-1607

Using cat6 will help a bit, too.

Alright thanks, I will look into that.

i tried the same option you're trying to use the usb port of the router to share files,
what i've heard the so called smb it makes to share the drive with the rest of the computers is just to slow for 1080p streaming.
get a decent NAS or a HP Microserver and your problems will be solved.

Well the external isn't connected directly to the router, it's connected to a laptop which is then connected to the router. And I do plan on building a NAS soon, just wanted to test this out in the meantime.

[stammie]

I had a similar issue recently I could only get around 2Mbps on my gigabit router and gigabit lan, I was an idiot and tried all sorts of things until my dumb ass decided to change the ethernet cable (which I should've done first), then it was problem solved.

[TRaSH]

oh sorry i miss read then,

if i'm not mistaking your laptop only has Integrated 10/100 LAN and not a gig lan,
so cat.6 wouldn't help.
but you can test new cable to be sre there's not a faulty cable.
btw cat 5e cble should also do gig speeds

what's the cpu load when streaming on your laptop ?
whats the bitrate of the movie you want to stream ?

[snowboarder33]

When streaming on my laptop from the external hard drive, the CPU load varies from 45%-55%.

Video bitrate average is about 15Mbps.

[outatouch0]

So is it safe to say the easiest solution is to hook the usb drive to the htpc when you want to use it then...? Or are you using that drive for other things while trying to watch movies etc.? The reason I ask is that drive is not going to multi-task well at all. ie: if you are d/l content while trying to access other content at the same time... This type of drive is simply not designed to handle that.

[TRaSH]

Try some simple tests.
Copy a big file from the laptop hard drive not external to your htpc.
Write down the speed.
Then from the external to your htpc.
Are there any speed differences?

[GomezAddams]

From my real-world experience, Windows SMB access over 100mb should yield 5-8 MB/s (mega BYTES per second) of file access.

The first potential bottleneck I see is USB. On my computer, hitting a USB disk hard will bring the computer to its knees. Try copying a file to the laptops local disk and see if your speed goes up.

Another possibility is duplex mis-match. I'm going to guess that your wireless router has 100mb switch ports, not gig (you can verify this by checking the link speed on your HTPC). 100mb ethernet has two modes half-duplex and full-duplex. NICs and switches are *supposed* to be able to auto-negotiate the best settings, but sometimes fail to do so. Try forcing your laptop and HTPC connections to 100mb full-duplex.

Some NICs and their drivers have features to "offload" some of the network processing from the OS to the NIC itself. These often create problems. Go into your NIC properties and disable any features that say "offload" - particularly chimney offload if it is there.

If all this doesn't help, I'd try connecting the laptop to the HTPC with a stand-alone switch.

Lastly, you could run wireshark on the laptop to sniff traffic. Networking is pretty complicated, but with a little research you could learn enough to see if there are problems like dropped packets.