Heavy network traffic makes internet unusable - QoS for certain IPs?

Question

I have a simple home network here - several PCs, one Router. My problem is that when my Laptop is copying large files from another PC, it's Network card gets completely saturated, to the point the internet is not usable on the laptop anymore (it's a 100 MBit Network chip, but the other PC and Switch are 1 GBit/s and have no problem saturating it). Internet goes through the same NIC.

Is there a way to prioritize traffic that goes to a specific IP (my router in this case)?

I'm using Windows Vista Home Basic and both router and gigabit switch are home-user models without fancy functions that would help...

Answer 1

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find anything that allows you to restrict bandwidth on the router (maybe DD-WRT can do it, but I don't have a router that can use it). You might want to consider restricting it on the laptop though. One program I've found (paid though) is NetLimiter, which allows you to restrict bandwidth based on individual programs. You can use it to limit the amount of bandwidth explorer.exe is allowed to use.