Setup Network balancing?

I have Windows 7 RC 7100 64-bit and my motherboard had dual gigabit lan (Two on-board Nic cards). How can I setup network load balancing so when I do local file transfers to my local server it won't effect my download speed? Is it possible or does it do it automatic.

 

I dont know if this will work the same way on Win 7...

Never tried it on a computer, but i know you can add static routes via command prompt which will load balance. the way it *should* work is by typing
route add destinationIP Destmask IPofonenic

Destination IP is your server
destination mask is that subnet mask
ipofnic is the ip of the NIC on your computer that you want traffic destined to your server to go through.

would look something like this:
route add 192.168.1.10 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.2
__________ip of server|___mask___________| your nic

I wasnt able to actually try this though since i dont have a computer with two nics that i can mess with. I know this works for load balancing on routers with point to point connections, but those are set up for internal traffic destined to different subnets. the field with Your NIC is actually supposed to be a gateway address, since its adding a route to another subnet. The way i wanted to try would just tell all traffic going to one ip address should go through the designated NIC... Worth a try.

 

you can't do it with routing statements. It usually takes software. My HP servers have "teaming" software that allow me to use them both simulaneously and load-balance over two NICs.

Since these are built-in LAN ports, you will need to talk to the motherboard manufacturer for the software, I'm sure. This isn't a "quick fix", especially with an OS still in RC. I seriously doubt they have developed anything for it, unless you can use XP/Vista 64-bit drivers.

 

wait, I re-read what you're trying to do.

If you think you're lagging your download connection by copying stuff to the server on the same nic at the same time, you probably can't. I doubt you can saturate a 10/100 connection, much less a 10/100/1000. Is your switch gigabit as well?

Think about it:
download speed on a fast cable modem: 20mb/sec (twenty megabits, not megabytes. 20 mb/sec = 2.5MB/sec download)
cross-LAN traffic: 40-60 mb/sec (6-8MB/sec pc to server)

You would still top out at 80mb/sec on that nic. If your switch is 1000mb, you have plenty of overhead.

If you really want to improve performance, kill extra applications that might be hammering your hard drives and make sure your pagefiles are defragmented. You'll get a better performance boost from keeping clean machines.

 

To KrushR's point you wont drive your NIC into saturation by doing downloads from the Internet. You should have plenty of bandwidth to do Internet downloads and downloads to your other machines on the same net.

To load balance between two nics on your machine. You need the software to drive the nic cards in that fashion as KrushR has stated AND you will need a switch that will treat two IP addresses as one address.