Now from home

I wrote some time ago that I was having problems with my Windows Home Server and my main PC, mainly because the transfer speeds from my WHS to my PC were ridiculous. Uploads were fine though.

After looking into it for a long time, the problem was that my router/switch, an SMC Barricade, was not handling the traffic from the WHS properly. Every other PC was working right.

Anyway, I’ve changed the router by a Linksys WRT320n. This means that I’ve upgraded my LAN from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps.

Transfer speeds are now ok, getting 60 MB/s out of the box. Also, the wireless speed has improved dramatically, specially when using my iPhone 3Gs. Using my old router I was unable to watch YouTube videos and now they are loaded in no time.

I’ve been using this router only for a couple of days, but I’m already very happy with the upgrade.

I have had only one minor problem setting up the wireless connection. For some reason none of my WIFI devices were able to connect to the router. I needed to manually change the ‘WIFI channel’ from Auto to channel 11 in order to get it to work.

In one of my computers, the simple action of creating a new folder or renaming a file was taking a lot of time. Windows Explorer seemed to freeze for a variable amount of time. Sometimes a few seconds sometimes as long a one minute!

Obviously some shell extension was the culprit, but which one? The idea of uninstalling one by one was discouraging, so I lived for a while with the problem until I found this little tool:

ShellExView

The ShellExView utility displays the details of shell extensions installed on your computer, and allows you to easily disable and enable each shell extension.

It literally save me a lot of time. You need to run this tool as an Administrator if you want to disable any shell extension.

It turns out that the shell extension that was causing the slow down was TortoiseSVN. For some reason it doesn’t seem to work well on my Windows 7 x64 computer. It does work ok on my laptop (W7 x86).

Time to update to the lastest version and review my settings.

Note: Installing TortoiseSVN’s latest version solved the problem, but I needed to run ShellExView again to enable it again.