Problem with 2nd NIC

infinitii · Post by **infinitii** » Fri Aug 04, 2000 10:58 am

Can anyone let me know why with a second NIC installed it slows the boot process down to a snails pace (I mean slooow 8( ).

I'm running a Celeron 400 on a BH6 board with 160M ram running 98SE, 1 NIC is 10base for cable connection. The 2nd card is 10/100base (this is the 3rd card I've tried). I want to hook two PC's up to share the connection.

By the way, is it better just to do the peer to peer thing or use a hub/switch? Also what exactly is the difference between a hub/switch? Which is better to use?

Any help/suggestions would muchly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Andy9753 · Post by **Andy9753** » Fri Aug 04, 2000 11:51 am

As for why the boot process slows to crawl with a second NIC I don't have an answer for you. But the difference between a hub and a switch is a hub is basically you can connect multiple computers together and whenever a network request is made it is broadcasted to all computers connected. As the network grows this begins to slow down the network. A switch is a "smart" hub in that it will learn MAC addresses of the NIC card installed in all the different computers and when a network broadcast is made the switch will route the request to the correct MAC address instead of sending out the request to all of the computers. In a small network Ie. less than five computers a hub is the better choice. Why you ask? Because a switch adds latency to the network when it recieves a request it has to process and then identify where it should send the request to. Also in a small network ie.. home it is unlikely that all five systems will be using the network constantly. There is a post in the Cable/Dsl forum with a link to a I think a 4 port switch for $53.00 which is about what I paid for my 8 port 10Mbs hub. I have the same problem with a slow boot after installing a SCSI card to my system along with a NIC I pull either one the system boots faster but with both a slow boot.