What I'm trying to accomplish is to stream movies in divx format to my work laptop which unfortunately has to stay xp.

Samba is functioning correctly and shares the files fine however is extremely choppy while viewing them with vlc. I can stream videos online with no issue from the laptop so I don't foresee it as being an issue w/ wireless. I even tried another .11g card/router just to be sure.

What im getting at here, is are there any utils to benchmark the output of samba and or tweak it for more speed ie cache , priority , something like that ?

Has anyone had any success using something else ?

Regards
JKZfixme

The bitrate of any video you are streaming online is going to be less than a DivX file on your computer, so that is not a very accurate indicator. That said, Samba is more than fast enough to stream any sort of video you throw at it. I get about 10 MBps from my Samba server, which is enough to stream even Blu-ray.

Have you tried mapping a shared drive to the Samba share rather than simply browsing the network in Explorer? I have found this generally improves performance under XP. You might also want to look into the performance of the drive locally on the Samba server. If you are having DMA issues for example, then you could be getting poor read/write speeds on the server, which will directly translate to low access speeds from the clients. You can use the hdparm command to test read/write speeds on a local drive.

As for testing client-side read/write speed, I know there is software for Windows that tests speed by reading and writing to a test file; but it has been a long time since I used Windows, so unfortunately I don't know any names off hand.