Transferring Files over Ethernet

Here's the deal. I wanted to transfer about 25GB of data from one laptop to another.

One of the laptops is an HP Pavillion dv2000 and the other is a DELL Studio XPS 16"

Both computers are running Vista and I connected the two laptops with a CAT 5E patch cable. (length 1 m)

The files are getting transferred at ~ 375 KB/sec which is really really slow.

I checked the network cards on both the machines and they are as following

1) HP pavillion dv2000 - Marvell Yukon 88E8039 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Connection
2) Dell Studio XPS 16" - Broadcom Netlink Gigabit Ethernet

I am unable to understand as to why the transfer is so slow. I would have expected much faster transfer rates.

Madly googling to try and find out why, but most people who are faced with this problem are using some sort of router or another, which I am not.

Oh and btw, Windows Vista sucks!! Just waiting to get my free upgrade to Windows 7