Jim,
Some things to consider before you "jump in the water".
I had heard that most cable modems use a 10MB port. (And I wonder, now
after saying this here, if some folks have had issues because they are
using 100MB cards connected to their cable modems. I remember one guy
who kept losing his connection. Maybe his card was autosensing and kept
switching back to 100MB when it lost connection to the cable?)
The point here, is that since the bottleneck is cable (1.5MB) then I
would think that the 10MB card is fine for outbound (It just jump to the
cable modem and then it is in their world). A 100MB card for the inside
LAN will at least feed the data faster around the LAN side. I would
suggest that you just switch your cards in your STN box to just 10MB
10Base-T. Then get a 10/100 hub/router on your network. Use 100MB NICs
on the LAN workstations. Again the STN inbound is probably only going
to be as fast as the cable (1.5) anyway. I wouldn't expect the bottle
neck to be so bad with 10MB NICs. Once it gets to the hub, the uplink
to the workstations is 100MB (especially on a router with each port at
100MB). Or you can go 50/50, and get a slightly older motherboard with
PCI and ISA slots. This way you can go 10MB on the ISA and 100MB on the
PCI (especially if you try the two 100MB cards and then have trouble
like oweljr did).
That is what I am thinking of doing. I have STN with COAX LAN NIC to an
older 10BaseT hub with a coax backbone. My workstations are 10BaseT
10MB NICs (kept tripping over the coax lines - screwing up the
connectors - and bringing things down - had enough of that. Actually
bought combo cards at the time.) Probably will need to change my STN
LAN side COAX NIC to 10Base-T or just uplink my current 10Base-T hub to
the new 10/100 router (seeing that I already have the hub).
All in all, 6 workstations in my office running at 10MB is really just
fine.
Arnie
Jim Harris wrote:
>
> Arnie,
>
> Good reply!
>
> I am thinking about upgrading my network to 100-base-t (& getting rid of
> my coax backbone!) now that I have cable. Unfortunately, (it would
> seem) all 100-base-t cards are PCI - so I would have to do an upgrade to
> a PCI based system.
>
> Most of the PCI stuff I have seen is auto-set (like you said), but it
> would be interesting if you could "fix" the setting for a slot.
>
> I will have to look into this myself.
>
> Jim
>
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