Nic Vs Usb Cable Modem

[Tyke]

The last few months, I've had pretty good speeds downloading from Kazaa and Usenet. With a claimed 1mbit connection I should hope so too! Speeds never seemed to reach the claimed maximum, but I put that down to the usual traffic etc etc so I was happy.

I've just rearranged everything, and my PC is now too far away from my cable modem for the USB lead to reach. Seeing as I recently put a NIC into my PC, I figured it was about time to knock up a crossover cable, ring the ISP, register the mac address with them and connect that way instead. What a difference it makes!

OK, kazaa speeds are still about the same, that's to be expected. But I noticed a vast increase in surfing speed whilst using kazaa (heavily).

Running a speed test from a server located in Texas (i'm in the UK so it's a good few miles away) I am finally returning a connection speed of just over 1mbit/s. Not bad considering the distance to the server, and that it's a sunday afternoon here when internet traffic is usually quite high!

The ISP is Blueyonder by the way.

If any of you are still connected via USB, go out, get a network card (they're only a few quid) and bung it into your machine. The improvement is well worth the 15 minutes it takes to install one!

[DivX]

i agree i was a USB user on the old Terajon Black Broadband box but that was when you wanted it on t-based ethernet you were on the phone for an hour re-programming your pc so usb was a god send

now the ISP's are providing plug n play modems that go stight to ethernet without a call to isp's it's so much better.

see USB uses your CPU direct so your putting extra stess on the CPU and anything else the CPU has to deal with, where as a network card is hardware based it dose all the work without using the CPU as much.

there are cheap and nasty network cards though that are software kinda based and don't work very well usually the unkown un-named stuff about £4

then you can get good stuff like Intel or 3Com which are true hardware cards and work faster and better than anything else, i know i just upgraded to a Intel 10/100+ from a £4 special and noticed a 12% drop in CPU usage running exact same stuff,and a better compatobility with firewalls too.

cheers