There's a huge thread on problems with Windows 7 network performance that's grown practically impossible to respond to:
In that thread I posted that I was unable to reproduce the problems others were seeing, and offered to compare physical configurations and network settings with others in hopes to find a key difference that might allow others to correct or at least work around the problem.
At the time I was testing with 100BASE-T Ethernet connections to an old Dell router, and I didn't know whether my setup would scale up to a faster link speed. I've just recently upgraded to a Linksys/Cisco E4200 v2 high performance router, which provides gigabit Ethernet wired connections, and I'm glad to report I'm still able to saturate the links with transfers between my systems. Everything's nice and fast.
I have, for example, been able to transfer a nearly 1.5 gigabyte file in 15 or so seconds. Here's a sample COPY file transfer between Windows 7 x64 and Windows Vista x64 systems (NoelC4 and NoelC2 respectively):
These are two Dell Precision workstations (specifically, a T5400 and a 470), using the on-motherboard Ethernet connections in both cases. The T5400's Ethernet port is a Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx Gigabit Controller, and the 470's is an Intel PRO/1000 MT controller. Both are set to defaults.
If you are having a Windows 7 network slowness problem, please feel free list your configuration and how your setup is wired. Perhaps we can discover what's different from a setup that is able to get all the speed it can.
-Noel
Detailed how-to in my new eBook: Configure The Windows 7 "To Work" Options
