Use FTP for faster file sharing with Windows
Feb 09, '04 09:43:00AM • Contributed by: scottjenson
I've been a good little Mac head and did the 'obvious' thing to share files between my PC (running XP home) and my G4 PowerBook (10.3.2): I started "Windows Sharing" on the Mac side. It's a bit touchy and things don't always work, but in general, I can find my Mac from the PC (using an IP address only; browsing from the PC doesn't work) and copy files from the PC to the Mac. The only problem: it is SLOW. Things often start very fast but after about 50MB, it bogs down and starts to crawl. I'd like to understand this issue in more detail but that isn't really the point of this tip. I've found a fairly good workaround: use FTP.
I downloaded a free FTP client for my PC (I happened to use FileZilla which is OK but it has a confusing UI), turned on FTP sharing on my Mac and found that what used to take 20 minutes to copy, I can now copy in under 50 seconds! This certainly isn't going to be easy for newbies, as an FTP client like FileZilla can be a bit intimidating, but once you get it setup, it is very fast.
Any comments on making PC/Panther file sharing better would be appreciated as that is the real problem (I searched the hints but couldn't find anything).
[robg adds: I thought we had previously run a hint on using FTP for Mac/PC file transfers, but I can't find it this morning ... so apologies if this is a duplicate.]
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