Best way to test home network?

Something is off on my network. While surfing and downloading all seem to be fine(except QoS refusing to work but thats another mattter) internal transfers seem to be off. I was going to bring my laptop to work tonight to watch a movie. So I went to transfer a 6GB file I had ripped to my desktop PC to my laptop and the estimated time was 1.5hrs. That just seems a little off. My router is a Linksys WRT54GL, my desktop is hardwired and my laptop is wireless over 802.11G.

Thoughts?

Wireless. Go wired for a 6GB file and it will be fast. Go wireless and your neighbor turns on a microwave and it gets real slow real fast. It's not quite that bad in real life, but you get the idea.

yeah, he's right,the wires are still running the show

I had a WRT54G suddenly crap out on me.. Only one wireless connection was available at a time. Had three laptops, 2 wouldn't work, and one would.. but it was random which one would work. All would appear on the home network, but only one would be able to access the internet at a time. I saved the router config to my desktop, bought another router, and loaded the config.. problem solved

54mbit wifi connection your looking at a max saturation of about 45-50% which is only 24.3-27mbit/s which is 3.0375-3.375MB/s and if you calc it out your talking 30-33min MINIMUM to transfer a 6gb file over 54mbit wifi ... this is if you have excelent signal strength running at 54mbit, and great link quality.... you go down in any one of thoes your transfer will take longer and longer... although 1.5hrs does seem quite a bit.

I would definitely go wired. It will be a lot faster!

The connection was fine. It was sitting three feet from the router. I would have done wire but I was just going to let it transfer while I got ready and didn't have the time to hunt down a cord. Nothing else was downloading or any other traffic on the network. It just struck me as being really excessive. I was think 30-45 minutes sounded reasonable. My house is sitting in the middle of an acre. I can only see one other network and it is a very week signal so I doubt the frequency was saturated by other network traffic. This router is starting to irritate me, I had high hopes but it seems around every corner is another disappointment.