slow transfer to external usb hd

[mmoalem]

hi there -i have installed slampp to hd on an athlon 1700+ xp laptop
with usb2 pcmcia card and a usb2 external hd formated to fat32. i have
tried to transfer files from a windows machine to the external disk and
i get transfer rate of about 750kbytes/sec. seems slow to me... is it?
if so how can i test the usb2 bandwith and benchmark the disc? and are
there any settings that could speed up the transfer rate
the disks show as /dev/sda1 and 2 and i mount them using
mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1

i also tried to upgrade the xfce package to 4.2.3 and now i cant get
into x (after startx it goes into black screen and back into
console)... has anyone else came across that..?

cheers
michel