Achieving decent network speeds from my Aspire V17 Nitro Gigabit network card

excalibur2811

I just bought a new Synology DS218+ NAS which is a gigabit network device, and also updated to a Gigabit router. However when I connected both the NAS and my Aspire V17 Nitro to the router, the network speed on my laptops Broadband Netlink Gigabit Ethernet is still showing as 10/100 Mbit/s and transfer rate between my laptop to/from the NAS is really slow. 

So, my question is - How can I activate the Gigabit ethernet on my laptop to achieve at least a little bit more speed? Is there some super driver I maybe need to download?  or something in BIOS? or some switch somewhere? Fair enough, I am still using my existing CAT 5 cabling but all this is located in one room (my study) and the technicians I spoke to have told me that the cable is almost certainly NOT the source of the problem I am having. However to check the problem they want me to take all my kit there and I would prefer to try and solve it myself. So if anyone can help me out I would appreciate it.  Obviously I am not expected 1 Gigabit of speed but I did not expect to stay exactly where I was before I upgraded the router! Thanks.

excalibur2811

Solved. It was the Cat5 cable. I took my laptop and tried connecting it to the router with a CAT5e cable and instantly it showed 1 Gigabit connection speed. I then connected the old cable again and it went down to 100Mb. Tomorrow I buy 2 x CAT6 cables - one for my laptop and one for my router! Hope this helps someone out there!

excalibur2811

Solved. It was the Cat5 cable. I took my laptop and tried connecting it to the router with a CAT5e cable and instantly it showed 1 Gigabit connection speed. I then connected the old cable again and it went down to 100Mb. Tomorrow I buy 2 x CAT6 cables - one for my laptop and one for my router! Hope this helps someone out there!