samba very slow in accessing large folders?
 

i'm running samba in BackTrack on my laptop. i use samba to connect to my desktop running windowsXP. i'm able to transfer files between XP and BackTrack and vice versa. i'm using a cat5 cross cable to connect the two computers directly at 100 Mbps. the problem is whenever i want to access any big folders of the size say some 500MB,it takes a long time to see those shares in the linux machine.after some 5 mins i see the operation is futile and close the window. only small folders of the size say 50MB,are readily accessible in linux.but when accessing the linux shares from windows,whatever be its size,it becomes quicly available. the two computers when connected together using XP doesnt have this problem.my laptop has 256MB ram and i run kde in linux and the superkaramba theme shows that my ram used up is some 220 MB.can the small amount of ram be connected to the reason of the problem.i'm at a loss to find a solution to this problem and wonder why samba is too slow to access large folders!