Frankly, at gigabit speeds, the bottleneck shifts from the network to the hard drives of the individual machines. The slowness is probably cos of some other issue and not the network... either the individual machines or viruses/worms and what not. I transfer stuff between my desky and lappy using a CAT6 cable for gigabit speeds. Its always the case that the hard drive is the bottleneck. Unless you have a pair of striped raptors, it'll always be a hard drive bottleneck... that is unless u are using a pokey PCI network chip .