So I kept on having performance issues with MCE 2005 and my Xbox 360 with a gigbit ethernet wired home. Crazy, crazy, stuff. It worked fine for a little bit after my last fix and has recently gone bad again without any new software installed. I decided to take the plunge and install Vista on my server. Wow, Media Center looks really nice Microsoft, good job! However, the network performance was still sub par. Completely dejected now, I went to Fry's to get a network cable tester to make sure all my wiring was alright. Turns out everything was fine with my cables in use so I went searching the web again for any clues when I stumbled upon a couple of links:
From the second link, I tried method two and wham, the network performance tuner was pegged out and had all the bandwidth it needed for HDTV and beyond.
Whew! Case closed, Rx Pause in the Gigabit ethernet driver flow control settings. I'll have to remember that one.
UPDATE (4/24): It's back and I don't know why!!! This sucks.
UPDATE 2 (4/24, part 2): Troubleshooting some more... So don't do both, even though I had only set the flow control to RX Paused, having the 100Mbps Full duplex setting with RX Paused might've been slowing it down too much. Turning the Speed & Duplex setting on my DLink DES-1024D switch back to Auto seems to have fixed it (at least for now).
UPDATE 3 (4/30): Problems came back again, and this time, I know why it keeps coming back. Evidently, the network adapter driver on Vista for Broadcom's NetXtreme 57xx series doesn't retain its advanced settings on reboot. Even though the settings show Rx Pause after a reboot, its really not set, it must just be a UI setting it's remembering. Everytime I reboot I have to change from Rx Pause to AUTO and back to Rx Pause for it to work. So the original problem wasn't XP, it was the gigabit issue and the recurrance of the issue is caused by a faulty Vista driver. I'll have to see what type of support I can get from Broadcom on this...
