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How can I test the speed of a LAN? I hope there is something baked into Windows to do this, because I am unable to install any third-party products.

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Well you can just look at the network in the control panel and see if the LAN is connected at 10/100/1000 mbit. But that doesn't tell you the whole story. If you want to test the speed between two PCs, you really need a tool to do it. One tool I've used that seems pretty good is 'iperf', it's just a commandline EXE, doesn't require any install. 'ping' will tell you the latency, but not the available bandwidth.

Example usage of iperf:

On one PC run it in 'server' mode: iperf -s

On another PC run it in 'client' mode, and give it the IP of the first PC: iperf -c 12.34.56.67

You may need to use larger packet sizes to get the full speed, try adding -l 64K -w 64K or something.

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+1 for iperf. Another option would be to use the built-in ftp client, which displays the transfer rate, but iperf is a better option, because with FTP and gigabit LAN the hard drives are likely a bottleneck. – simon Feb 17 '10 at 11:36
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You can right-click on the LAN connection and then Check the 'Status'. That will give you the link speed. You can also open a command prompt and run ping.exe to ping other computers on the network.

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Link speed doesn't reflect the actual speed of the network. Ping and tracert in Windows commandline would probably do what you're looking for... – Glen Y. Jan 28 '10 at 17:44
Link speed is irrelevant. And 32 byte packets simply will not tell me anything (will always be < 1ms). Trace route will also not work because there are no hops. Thanks though. – Josh Stodola Jan 28 '10 at 17:46
Or just copy a large file over the network and just do the math. It will give you the network throughput. You could also monitor this with 'Networking' Tab in the task manager. Be sure to add the additional columns. – Kelbizzle Jan 28 '10 at 18:13

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