birdie_in_Texas

am still trying to find that link to the router that had a "storage connection" if i remember that right..

i guess it will boil down to which one is on sale when i go to Fry's next..

i will definitely not spend over $100, and i will need to upgrade at least 2 of the wireless usb plug thingies as well..so i am gonna be out in the neighborhood of $250 or so..more than i wanted to spend, but i feel it pretty necessary...

was looking at that cool "Vision" one that has some kind of screen on it with a bandwidth usage/monitor thing..maybe it will be on sale or sumpin'..!

thanks for all the input fellas..i will elt ya know

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ScratchMonkey

Don't feel dumb. I had to look it up a few months ago, and I breathe networking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_6_cable

The big issue is the termination at the connector. You have to maintain twist in the wires right up to the fingers in the connector, the closer the better. At higher data rates, the untwisted part is a big loss point, and there are special termination schemes to make sure the twist gets as close as possible.

If you're buying a patch cord for 100 megabit, just go CAT5. If you're wiring your house, and you think gigabit or 10 gigabit over copper will someday be used (and I think it will), use the best cable you can buy. The cost of the wire is nothing compared to the cost of ripping down walls to replace the cheap stuff.

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birdie_in_Texas

i need (4) 10-footers and (1) 25-footer (to go to all-in-one printer/fax/copier) so you think i am good with what i got? only my "gamer" machine has a "gigabit" LAN connection anyways...everything esle is "normal" stuff..

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ScratchMonkey

What's the gigabit connection? Is it just a hard wire from the game machine to the router? Does anything else use gigabit? If not, then you've just got a fast hop that then gets bottlenecked down to the speed of the next hop.

CAT5 is fine for all the slow stuff. CAT5e is good for gigabit, esp. over such a short distance. (Note that gigabit uses more of the pairs and a different encoding scheme to get higher speed, not a faster bit rate on one pair. It needs better termination to avoid crosstalk between the pairs at the connectors.) But you can use CAT5 over short distances at gigabit speeds. I do that.

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jb4

I concur with Scratch on that one. I have a hardwire Cat 5 to the "gigabit" connection but it is only as fast as my ISP. The ISP downstreams at 2.6-3.0 megs per second which I believe is only 26-30% of the gigabit potential.

EDIT: My decimals are off. You are correct Scratch.

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ScratchMonkey

Gigabit = 1000 megabits. So 3/1000 = 0.3%. Comcast claims to be moving the SF Bay Area to 16 Mbps, so 1.6% of a gigabit. (But it'll still kick you off if you're a P2P "bandwidth hog". Apparently they don't understand how to implement automatic fairness shaping.)

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kin3

Just a note on the Belkin N. I sent in a trouble request yesterday afternoon and today I received a reply and their solution works.

The problem was that my computer is hooked to the router and my wife's is wireless. I would loose connection all of a sudden and she would be fine. Then after a while it would come back or I would reboot and it would come back.

The solution was to disable Windows Firewall. I lost connection again and I did disable the firewall and instantly the connection came back. So it looks like it worked.

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The Old Guy
kin3

ScratchMonkey

I wonder why Windows Firewall would do that? What brain damage could it have that would have that kind of effect? I'm using the AVG firewall that comes with their Network Edition on my office machine, so I'm wondering if it might interact badly with an upstream router as well, and I'm misinterpreting the occasional slowness I see (like when starting a download from Firefox and it takes many seconds for the download prompt to appear).

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birdie_in_Texas

thereis a little "N" router at Fry's today in the ad for $30

i think it is an "airlink" or somthing..

think it is worth a shot to see if it improves my setup?

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=DdogG=

no. you get what you pay for. especially in this area.

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Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. -Albert Einstein
The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity. -Harlan Ellison

If all else fails: "rm -rf /"

birdie_in_Texas

when/if my tax return hits, i am going to try this linksys

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage....=1194054018654

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ScratchMonkey

Do you have any file sharing going on your network? If so, try to get a model with traffic shaping, typically sold as a "game router". It gives priority to game and VOIP traffic over other kinds of traffic.

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VegaBond

Yeah I'm about to replace my aging,failing,crap range MR814 with this WRT one, I hear so much stories how great it is with DD-WRT stuff on it.. My only question is I want to have static IPs for my 3 PCs

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Twiggy

Try a Linksys wireless N- router it is a very fast one. I had ping problems when i had my old regular wireless WRT54g router but now my ping averages at around 30-40. It is also Wireless G backwards compatible to suit all your needs

birdie_in_Texas

scratch? i have a linksys "network optimizer"..it is supposed to do that very thing..

hopefully it will continue to work with a newer setup..

but if i get one of the "extreme's" then i might not need it anymore?

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