Question: I have two laptops,

One is running Ubuntu 12.04 (EXT4) the other is running Windows 7 (NTFS).

I am copying over 40gb of data (one file) from the Ubuntu laptop to the Windows Laptop.
(Browse the shared folder on Ubuntu using Windows copy/paste)

But I am getting transfer speeds topping out at ~700kb/s Surely this is not right.
I am transferring via wifi on both laptops.

My download speeds can reach 7-8mb/s on both laptops, so I know it is not the wifi cards or the router topping out. 

```
wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 84:4b:f5:db:b4:85  
          inet addr:192.168.1.66  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::864b:f5ff:fedb:b485/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:11941185 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:11306693 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:10087111370 (10.0 GB)  TX bytes:7843524888 (7.8 GB)

```

Answer: 
Samba can be slow in some scenarios, in my experience. Most likely due to bugs that only show themselves in some cases. I dropped it for NFS (which won't be an option for you) but you can look at things like HTTP, FTP or even bittorrent. They're all a little more painful to set up but in my experience they're all faster than Samba.

Hell, I've had SCP (file transfer over SSH) go faster than Samba.

---

Pre-post-edit-breakdanceoff:
----------------------------

For a super-simple, probably vastly insecure webserver you open a terminal, cd into the directory you would like to share and run:

```
python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000

```

That seems to bind on all interfaces to port 8000. So just go to `http://<your-network-ip>:8000` and you should see a file listing. Amazing!
use NFS for file sharing between windows and ubuntu

follow [this link](http://sagehacks.wordpress.com/2009/01/21/howto-mount-nfs-shares-under-windows-7/) to install nfs on ubuntu and [this link](http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324055) to install nfs client on windows