NIC cards?

[WoodPeckr]

A network card, network adapter or NIC (network interface controller) is easy to install and cheap ($4.00 plus $5.00 shipping at Newegg).
Question is, do they increase your download speeds enough, or that much, with a cable modem to make it worthwhile?

 

[InstantNoodle]

my question is... how old is your computer for it not to come with a built-in network card??

 

[Cassini]

Do yourself a favour: buy the Ethernet Card and buy an external hardware firewall and router. I recommend that anyone with high-speed use an external firewall/router.

If your computer is connected directly to the Internet via USB or Ethernet Connection into an unprotected cable modem, then you are essentially open to attack. Software firewalls are not enough. You need a hardware firewall. About a year or so ago, one of the security companies essentially said that it was impossible to stop the more lethal infections with a software firewall. Your computer is just too open if software is the only line of defense between you and the Internet.

FYI: On cable, you might notice a slight speed increase with an Ethernet connection. The Ethernet API under windows is designed with faster hardware and software support than the USB API.

 

[papasmerf]

my question is... how old is your computer for it not to come with a built-in network card??

Woody has not bought into anything since the 2000 election.


Does that help????

 

[WoodPeckr]

my question is... how old is your computer for it not to come with a built-in network card??

It's a 9 yr old Pent.II that has run remarkably well and trouble free since a recent upgrade with a 120GB 7200RPM Seagate HD, in spite of being refered to as being a 'piece of crap' by another poster in another thread......

Do yourself a favour: buy the Ethernet Card and buy an external hardware firewall and router. I recommend that anyone with high-speed use an external firewall/router.

Bought an external router with firewall couple weeks back. Was using the firewall that came with XP. Talked with Tech dept at Adelphia months ago and they claim with their high speed internet system, that's all you need, the XP firewall. Prior to getting XP's firewall I just relied on Adelphia's system for protection while running Win 98 for several years and never had any problems.

 

[WoodPeckr]

FWIW:
Did get and install a NIC card, $9.00US including shipping, from Newegg.
After about a week of use have noticed a gain in performance of about 100-400 kbps in speed test results over what I was getting before.
Been getting on average between 2700-3200 kbps now with Time Warner in WNY.

 

[SilentLeviathan]

Wait, how were you connected to the internet before if you didn't have a NIC? were you just using onboard ethernet?

 

[WoodPeckr]

Before I was connected via USB port from PC, to USB Network adapter, to cable modem.

 

[Larry_Fyne]

Ethernet nics are rated for up to three different speeds. 10 mb / 100 mb / 1000 mb. Most combine 10/100 but some cheaper ones are available to support all three. Having said that, even the fastest cable internet speed of 9 mb/s (if you ever get that fast), is slower than the slowest ethernet speed.

 

[WoodPeckr]

??? if you live in the states or in asia you can get 30mb/s down. FIOS

While that high speed service is widely availabe in Japan, it is only available to very limited markets in the US, primarily businesses and Universities.

In this regard the US lags far behind Japan.

 

[Sparky69]

It's a 9 yr old Pent.II that has run remarkably well and trouble free since a recent upgrade with a 120GB 7200RPM Seagate HD, in spite of being refered to as being a 'piece of crap' by another poster in another thread......

I wouldn't say it's a piece of crap if it works for you, but you must be a very patient man with a PII runing XP.

 

[WoodPeckr]

I wouldn't say it's a piece of crap if it works for you, but you must be a very patient man with a PII runing XP.

Before I put in the new 7200 RPM Seagate 120 Gig HD with 8MB cache, there was a noticeable lag with the old 5400 RPM IBM 8.5Gig HD while running XP. Most of that lag is now gone with the new faster HD.
This really surprised me the most, plus no more HD chatter.

It reminded me of a few years back when I maxed out the SDRAM memory from 128 to 384......it was like getting a new much faster PC!
A buddy at work has, I believe, a 1.6Mhz PIII Toshiba laptop with only 256 Ram memory and his seems to run XP at about the same speed as my PII.

As far as on the internet goes, mine out performs his because I have a cable modem and use the Opera browser.

Plan on getting a new PC soon. Just can't decide if it will be a laptop, a Core2 Duo desktop, or wait for them Quad Cores just coming out.

 

[Sparky69]

Thanks for the info Woodpeckr.

I believe you that the faster spinning drive is helping give you acceptable performance once up and running.

I'm wondering if the startup and loading of the registry etc. takes a very long time?

I have a P4(D) desktop that takes about 25 to 30 second to load the full Windows XP OS including logging on to the PC and network. My laptop takes slightly longer, (+10 sec), but that is only because of negotiating the wireless networking. I have an old PII on the network and it runs okay, but running Win98 it takes what seems like forever to startup. About 4 to 5 min. I haven't run a check for XP compatability yet, but now you have me curious. I had just assumed it would be really slow loading XP as it is such a memory hog (while MS recommended 256 MB RAM, most reviews I read said you need a min 512 MB RAM for XP to run without bogging down - might part of your buddies challenge with the laptop too.).

 

[WoodPeckr]

I'm wondering if the startup and loading of the registry etc. takes a very long time?

My PII, 400Mhx with 384 SDRAM memory now takes approx. 75 seconds for startup, loading the registry and to get up and running with XP Pro!

Prior to this, when running Win98 with the old 5400 RPM HD it took about 2 minutes to be up and running.

When I switched to XP, it took about 4-5 minutes to be up and running with that old 5400 RPM HD. After replacing the original HD with the 7200 RPM Seagate HD that startup time dropped to the current ~75 second startup time!

The original 8.5 Gig HD was almost full.
It only had 650 megs of free space left!
I was running out of room fast, with all those constant XP updates and security patches that seemed to be added almost every day. This was another reason I spent $50 for that 120 Gig Seagate HD, I needed more room. I copied the whole HD over to the new Seagate HD, including the XP OS. Then pulled the old HD and replaced it with the Seagate HD and made the new HD the primary HD. Have been running happily ever since, better than ever, with no problems.

Something else very interesting happened that I have no answer for??????
When I copied the original HD over to the Seagate HD, 8.17 Gigs were copied over to the new HD. After transfer was complete I comfirmed the new HD had 8.17 Gigs in it as 'used space' and 21.83 Gigs as 'free space' on the 30 Gig partition the data and OS were placed on.
This lasted 1 day!!!!!
The next day when I checked the 'used space' on the HD, it now showed 4.05 Gig as 'used space' instead of 8.17 Gig as 'used space' as it did the day before!
The C partition now showed 4.05Gig 'used space' and 25.95 Gig 'free space'.
While the C partition showed 8.17Gig 'used space' and 21.83 Gig 'free space' the day before!
My questiuon is: Where did the missing 4.13 Gigs go?
Other than the missing 4.13 Gigs everything has been running very well.

 

[Sparky69]

Thanks for the info.
Could it be that the orginal drive was very fragmented and after the copy over it cleaned it self up on restart? I know it's not technically sound. I have seen this happen before some time ago and I can't remember exactly the conclusion (The IT consultant for our office helps me out now and then), but it was something simple or freaky like that.

 

[lonecoxxman]

I don't think this will help much with your question but I've gone thru a number of HD upgrades and despite a lot of emphasis to the installer that I want an exact copy of the old drive transferred to the new, higher memory drive, sometimes data gets lost it seems. Maybe its in there somewhere but I do seem to lose some data on these upgrades. In your case, I assume you have a corresponding amount of data missing that you no longer can find. At any rate, I find it very intriguing that upgrading the HD as you did would increase speed so much.

 

[WoodPeckr]

..... I assume you have a corresponding amount of data missing that you no longer can find. At any rate, I find it very intriguing that upgrading the HD as you did would increase speed so much.

Correct.
Slightly over half of the data transferred over to the new HD vanished.
However this old PC continues running better than ever.
Before the HD upgrade there was only about 650 megs of free space left on the old 8.5Gig HD which will cause poor performance. I knew this from past experience with Win98, how badly things went when the HD was that full.
XP handled and ran much better when the HD was that full. There were times it showed only 150 megs free space but XP didn't act as quirky as Win98 used to. I would just transfer data over to an external HD to get a couple Gigs of free space back again and things ran better again.
Having a new faster HD and plently of space (120Gigs now as opposed to 8.5 Gig before) made a world of difference in PC performance.

Could it be that the orginal drive was very fragmented and after the copy over it cleaned it self up on restart?

Doubt it. The Disk Defragmenter was run on a regular basis on the orginal drive once a week. I was told this is a 'good thing to do' back then with Win98 by a couple buddies at work.
Since running XP I see it is not necessary to run Disk Defragmenter that often.

 

[l69norm]

...My questiuon is: Where did the missing 4.13 Gigs go?..

You might have cleared temp or cached files in IE or you may have emptied the recycle bin.

 

[WoodPeckr]

You might have cleared temp or cached files in IE or you may have emptied the recycle bin.

Doubt it.
I clear all then items on a daily basis.
Been doing that for years.
It only takes a couple seconds to do.

That 4.13 Gigs just vanished.......

 

[joebear]

Doubt it.
I clear all then items on a daily basis.
Been doing that for years.
It only takes a couple seconds to do.

That 4.13 Gigs just vanished.......

you may have ran disk defrag but what about chkdsk or norton disk doctor?

also you may have had some program making backups and not automatically deleting them after a certain time.

bad files or undeleted recovered files may have taken up the space.