My media center PC has a problem.

It's a Shuttle PC, I've blogged the specs on this website before but I think the base spec is SN85G4V2 if I remember correctly.

It's all fine and Media Center works better with Vista than it did with XP for me so that's a good story too.

However, the box has one problem and it always has had since I bought it. The network card (which IIRC is all part of the nForce 3 chipset) is rubbish.

I've always had problems with this card. It would never (under XP or Vista) run at 100mbps. It would only run at 10mbps and, even then, I've been suspicious that it was actually running at much, much lower speeds.

This has always meant that transfers from the media center to other machines in the house have been problematic (i.e. slow).

Also, Nvidia don't support nForce 3 for Vista so you have to use the MS driver. I don't know how good/bad this is but it exhibits the same problems as I had running with the Nvidia drivers under XP so I think I have to blame the card.

Because the PC is a shuttle, it doesn't have a spare slot to just throw in another network card so I've always just put up with it.

Until today :-) Today, I got a LinkSys USB200M;

which is just a USB stick that surfaces up an ethernet connection. I plugged it into a USB slot on the media center, installed the drivers and swapped the network cable into this thing and then went to test.

Wow...what a difference that made. Instead of a 10MB file taking maybe 5 minutes (yep) to copy it now completes so quickly that I didn't really have time to count how long it was.

Ok, so I'm still never going to get over 100Mbps to this box but I can live with that. Chalk one up for LinkSys :-)