I recently bought a new router. I had the Lynksys BEFSR41 and purchased the Lynksys E3000. The connection to my 360 is wired and when I stream video to the 360 from my PC i was getting lag. I saw there is the network tuner in the media center on the 360.  When i did the test the bar graph goes from red to green bouncing all over, and my result was marginal network performance. I plugged in my old router and its fully solid green all the time and a perfect connection. plug in the new router...it starts bouning again.

I've gone through the entire process of static ip's firmware upgrades hard resets etc for the router and no improvement. I finaly gave the router to a buddy at work who has the same set up thinking maybe i just got a bum router. Sure enough all he does is plug it in, it connects right away and he has fully solid green bars.

Since it worked for him i think that eliminates the router as being a hardware problem with the router ...since i can plug in my old router and all is good i think that eliminates any cable issues.

Am i missing anything else with the media center? i've posted on the seven forums, lynksys forums and noone has any suggestions at this point. it seems the only thing left for me is to reformat my computer and start from scratch..i'm realy not wanting to do that at this point so any help would be greatly appreciated.  

 

I'd suggest checking your LAN cables (notably the one from your PC to the router) for damage, upgrading the NIC driver on your PC, and toggling the Flow Control setting on the NIC (in that order.)

One thing to keep in mind:  you upgraded your network backbone to Gb.  It can cause problems to show up, that were masked (or not possible) on a 10/100 LAN.

I actually found a pinch in the cable from the xbox to the router...its actually a 100 foot cable, so i can't easily replace and test it to see if thats the cause. But it worked fine on the old router, why not now? why the the network tuner in media center say that i could stream HD and have a perfect connection while 10/100 but only marginal and not capable of HD on the Gb?

Damage to the cable could very easily account for yoru issues, even though they weren't present with the old router.
I'm assuming that your HTPC has a Gb NIC in it (since that's been pretty much the norm for the last couple of years); therefore, it now has a Gb network connection (vs. its former 100Mb connection.)
Now, it can (and, is trying to) push more data than even the cable can allow (assuming that the pinched section did damage the wires.)  At least, that's the theory I'm going on.

Got a shorter patch cable you can try, if you can move the 360 and its display (or, the 360 and any display) closer to the router?
Or, try enabling Flow Control on your NIC (you can do this from Device Manager.)

well....i got a new cable and that didn't do anything a shame i had such high hopes. Im only using the onboard mobo nic which is a Realtek PCIe GBE and the drivers are upto date. The flow control has always been enabled....any other suggestions?

What is your frame size setting? Be sure to set them all the same.

It took forever to find it, but this was a solution for me when I had a similar problem a few years ago.... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929707 Hope it helps.

Well as it turns out this is pretty much all my fault. I was relying on the windows update for my driver update, and thought I had the most up to date driver as it was only 3 months old. After some search I found a newer driver and updated it manually and I now get perfect performance. Thanks for all the help.