Raymond.CC Blog

Few days ago my customer complained to me that his network is slow. Below is the small and simple network configuration of the office. They only need to have LAN network and also shared broadband connection.

Computer PC1, PC2 and PC3 doesn’t seem to have any problems with the network. Only users from PC4, PC5 and PC6 is complaining that the internet is slow and sometimes they’re unable to access PC1, PC2 or PC3 shared folders.

By right, the network speed shouldn’t drop a lot if go through a switch. To confirm the problem, I used a network benchmark tool to test the network speed.


Before I use software to test the network speed, the most simplest thing I can do is try downloading the same file from the same location on all the computers. On PC1, PC2 and PC3, I am able to achieve maximum download speed at 100kbps when downloading. But as for PC4, PC5 and PC6, I monitored the download and it can only download at 30-40kbps the most.

Now I know definitely there’s a problem with the internet speed. Next, I use AIDA32, an “outdated” professional system information, diagnostics and benchmarking program running on Win32 platforms. It is mainly used to extract details of all components of the PC but the Network Benchmark plugin works like a charm.

The project leader, Tamás Miklós has been appointed as the Executive Vice President of Software Engineering Research & Development at Lavalys. This caused the development of AIDA32 to become commercial and is now continued as a Lavalys product under the name of Everest. I’ve checked out Everest and it doesn’t even have Network Benchmark feature in it. That’s why I still use AIDA32 for only testing network but not for extracting computer information because it’s outdated.

To test network speed with AIDA32, download the archive, extract it and run aida32.exe. At the menu bar, go to Plugin and select AIDA32 Network Benchmark.

This network benchmark plugin is designed to measure the performance of TCP/IP networks using the classic HTTP protocol in a master-slave architecture between 2 computers.

For accurate results it is always recommended to close all applications that may be running in the background. If that’s possible, before running the benchmarks make sure to disable all background processes including anti-virus tools, IRC / ICQ / AOL / MSN clients and FTP servers / clients. For the most accurate results any user interactions (e.g. mouse clicks, task changes) should be avoided during the running of the benchmarking operations.

The master-slave solution used by the tests in this plugin require 2 computers to be connected by a TCP/IP network. The first computer should run the network benchmark plugin in Master mode, and the other computer should connect to the Master computer in Slave mode by entering the IP address or computer name of the Master computer. Then the actual network performance is measured and displayed on the Slave computer.

When you launch the Network Benchmark plugin, you are at the About tab. The Start button will be accessible once you are on the Bandwidth tab. I didn’t know this at first and was wondering how am I able to click the Start button…

After testing with AIDA32 Network Benchmark, it also confirms that the average speed is 60% slower on PC4, PC5 and PC6 which is NOT normal. I thought the problem lies with the D-Link 8 port switch but finally it turns out to the the D-Link Wireless Router. I’ve tried changing the switch, network cable but the problem still exist. Once I change the D-Link wireless router with a 3Com wireless router, the problem was gone! Now I know that it is better to avoid using cheap D-Link wireless routers in future.

P/S: The purpose of this article is for me to share with you the free and useful AIDA32 software but I ended up telling the whole story of my client’s network problem. Hope that it’ll help you out when you see such problem in future.

[ Download AIDA32 3.94.2 ]