10/100 fast ethernet card(pci)

[$1500-P4 gamer]

I can get this card new with the cable included from Wall-Mart for $19.98 or something. Is it worth it? Its the same card that Staples has here:

http://www.staples.com/Catalog/Brows...%28Desktops%29

Man thats one long link.

Any sugestions before I get it? Want to share dial up with other pc in liveing room. The other has 10/100 built in mobo. This should sufice for 56k dial up shareing right? Thanks.

[baquila]

Basically any 10/100 nic will be fine. It is simply a port to allow data through - it really doesn't do anything else. I've seen them for $60 but I've never seen or heard of any evidence from anyone that there is anything better about them. I have 2 servers and I'm buying 2 more computers as a test lab. I am starting my own company for installing networks in small businesses and every card I use and every one that I've installed all cost $20 and all work perfectly. I use either Netgear or Linksys and both work great. $20 is all you need to spend. Hope this helps.

[$1500-P4 gamer]

Hey thanks! He says as walking out the door,shutting card door, off to Wall-Mart! Hehe. This one includes a 25ft cable too. That makes the card what $10 or something?? Thanks that was a big help. Never networked beyond the direct cable connection deal for playing games. This should be way faster.

[Grentarc]

actually, i have found that cheap (realtek) cards are really horrible to transfer files across... i was transfering from my netgear FA312 card to my realtek over 2 gig of MP3z, and at one stage it said (in minutes) over 11 million years to go..... also, i find that no matter what they are in, they are always below par in bandwidth( file transfer) but some boards have them onboard, and i guess they would be ok for ICS...

[baquila]

Well, I never tried that brand. I have the same netgear you have though and it works great. $20 If the files were transfering that slow, I'm curious if it wasn't something else contributing to the problem? Bad driver, memory problems of one sort or another? Were you using windows 9.x by chance? In a related item - see what you make of this. I'm running win2k pro and win 2k advanced server. I noticed when using a gnutella client - grokster - that long downloads (over 100 mb) would run well for a while but get slower and slower until they were hardly moving near the end. It almost reminded me of win 9.x machines the way everything would slow down until you rebooted after a couple hours (every couple hours of everyday ) to restore the resources. For the heck of it I used the system monitor while downloading a large file straight off a web server to monitor what was happening. Alarmingly I found that as I downloaded using the built-in windows downloader, the available physical memory marched slowly down, down, down throughout the download. When it was done, the memory recovered to its previous level. When downloading using Download Accelerator Plus, the available memory never dropped a bit throughout the entire download. The speeds I was seeing were nearly the same on both trials. What do you make of that?

[belgarath16]

I am using W98SE on a LAN with $20 Intel Pro100 NIC's and backed up my drives over the LAN. It took 38 mins to transfer 5.6G's and verify compression. Pretty quick if you ask me. Maybe try Cacheman to manage your physical and virtual memory in the Windows enviroment. It forces Windows to release RAM when needed.

[BipolarBill]

I can vouch for the Linksys 10/100TX. It's an excellent card for the price. It's no 3Com or Intel server NIC, but it's more than adequate for home use. At work, bootable "managed" NICs are best.

[Grentarc]

i was using Win2k (the realtek) and WinXP wit the Netgear. It was using a crossover cable (1.5m). i used WinXP to dump the files on the Win2k machine.. the Celery (realtek) had 320 MB RAM, the XP (netgear) has 768 MB ram.. i don't think it was memory loss as of yet... dunno though..

[$1500-P4 gamer]

I was going to run a cross over cable but found out that some manufac.'s dont recomend it. Includeing the linksys I just got. Seems to be dif. than running through a hub as the hub does the error checking and then sends it on. Maybe that was your speed prob. My linksys also has a high speed transmit light that tells if its running in 10 or 100mb does yours have that and if so was it light? I dont know just guessing though as you can see I dont know nodda about networking! The other one I'm connecting to is a sis900 lan. I dont know how that one is but I hope it doesnt cause probs. Sjould know tonight finally, I borrowed a hub till I get it working right. Its a 10 base-T Netgear but my sys is 10/100 so I'll get a etherfast hub this week if it works right for me. A $30 four port 10/100 etherfast Netgear hub should work O.K. right? How are the cheapy hubs? At most I will connect four pc's when freinds come over to LAN party in the future so what should I look for? Any sugestions? Thanx for all the replys!

[baquila]

Hey $1500-P4 gamer - I have a suggestion. Now I don't know how this would apply to game LAN's in your house but to normal network traffic you would never want a hub - you would want a switch. Now being that everybody's computer is being updated with the same data at all times during a game, a hub may work great for that specific application. The linksys sight has some great intros to networking where they cover the difference between switches, routers, and hubs. As far as a crossover cable goes, the manufacturer of the hub will be able to tell you specifically but the general rule is that crossover cables are only used to connect directly from one NIC to another NIC. Some hardware, especially the older hardware, did require crossovers. But generally all network connections are done with straight through cables. The matter regarding the hub would be a great question for one of the gaming forums. I know business networks better than gaming I'm afraid.

[Grentarc]

when we have LANs, we always use switches.. because you could have more than one game on the network, therefore a switch works better. The cards were both conected at 100Mbit via the crossover. I used the crossover because the only hubs i have are 10Mbit, os it would have taken the years it said it would (oh, BTW, it was only the NIN portion of my collection it said that for.. [1GB of the total 2.5 or something] thenit went down after it did those. and no, i wasnt doing anything on either computer at the time.) Other computer technicians i have talked to say that Realtek are "100MBit on a good day with a stiff tailwind", otherwise they work great at 10MBit.

[Bullion]

with 10base its good for 1 megabyte a second,
100 is good for 10 megabytes a second, so really 10 base is fine for almost anything apart from large file sharing. I run a co-axial network (no hub, just t pieces and bnc connectors) i download through my network on a client at 500k/sec. This is on budget AU$10 (about US$5) realtek cards. These are realworld numbers, and my experience.

cheers

[$1500-P4 gamer]

So I want a switch not a hub? O.K. Good thing you told me as I havent bought anything yet other than lan card, had other, both are fast ethernet 100T but I have them on auto and they are sensing the 10T hub I borrowed. Hence the 10T for now. So the switches are like hubs though like rateings of 10/100 or the new 1000 stuff right? Any recomended budget ones that will work for 3-4 player gameing? And these do regular Internet connection shareing and FTP transfers right? Basically I mean can you do the same things with them that you can with a hub but just game faster? Do you setup the networking the same as with a hub? thanx for the help so far guys as you can tell I'm new to this networking deal. Absolutely no one in my area even knows how to do a DCC on the parallel port (man there easy) much less this LAN stuff. Thanx!

[BipolarBill]

A switch is a no-brainer to set up. Treat it just like a hub. You will need one rated 10/100 if you have a mixed network. If not, 100TX is fine.

[baquila]

A switch is like a "smart" hub. A hub doesn't know or care what is connected to it. Any data that comes into the hub gets sent out to every single other computer (or device) connected to it. A switch "knows" what computers are connected to it. So if computer A makes a request for a file from computer B, the message goes into the switch and only gets sent to computer B. If you have a four port switch with computers C and D on it also, computer C and D would never even know about the request for the file from A to B. Then of course the file gets transfered back through the switch and only to computer A. So this keeps network traffic to a minimum. It makes a huge difference. There are switches and hubs that both support 10/100 but for the difference in price versus performance there is no reason to use a hub. If you want a great all in one device I always recommend this one :

http://linksys.com/Products/product.asp?grid=23&prid=20

It's will allow all of your computers to share one internet connection (cable or DSL connection that is), it has a built in firewall to protect your network, it has a four port switch, and it will even handle assigning the IP addresses to each of your computers. If you read the manual (about 15 pages) you'll have all of your computers sharing the internet connection, playing games, and swapping files in about an hour. It costs $90 brand new at any computer store. I have one myself and I love it. I have never heard a single complaint from anyone. It does support 10/100. You'll set it up and never have to think about it again. And don't worry about going beyond four computers - it supports over 200 devices chained together with other switches or hubs. Hope this helps.