USB 10/100 ethernet adapter

[doubledc]

are there any known problems with using one of these as opposed to a PCI card. just having trouble getting a few games to run. internet and file sharing and a few games working fine. the USB adapter is hooked up to the client right now but I could switch it to my cable modem or just replace it if would make a difference.
I saw a faq that mentioned a"IPX/ODI " network card. I tried to set IPX as default protocol but it made no difference. but no idea what ODI refers to as this is my first networking experience and was pretty happy to have it working as well as it is.

 

[ScottMac]

If you have a "built" computer system (versus Dell, Compaq, Gateway, etc...), and the motherboard has a VIA chipset, you may need to go to www.viahardware.com or www.viatech.com and get a patch / driver for your USB port.

I think the current patch rev is 1.08.

Good Luck

Scott

 

[doubledc]

running P-3 on 440bx

 

[Garion]

ODI is a REALLY old style NIC driver. It was kind of a standard interface between the protocol and the NIC. You'd load ODI in dos, then bind protocols to it. I don't think anything but IPX was ever setup with an ODI interface, however.

You'd ONLY use IPX/ODI if you were manually loading an ODI driver in DOS then binding to it from Win9x. No need to do this anymore, this stopped being useful shortly after 95 was released.

- G

 

[doubledc]

thanks

 

[blstriker]

My only caveat for USB adapters is that they are very slow. Slower than a 10 baseT NIC even. Check this out. But if it works fine for what you need to do, then there's no reason to stop using it.

 

[acexg1]

blstriker is right, they are a lot slower. But in some cases, such as when there are no PCI slots open, it is necessary.

 

[Mday]

when usb 2.0 is more wide spread, it should get faster... =P

 

[spidey07]

Even if USB has higher bandwidth it is still going to be slow for networking.

USB adapeters are by design bad at being a NIC. think about it...it is a serial connection. PCI is parallel. A NIC has to frame the entire packet in order to send and receive the entire packet to pass up to the driver. That very fact alone makes USB a very poor choice for networking. Hey BLstriker! maybe somebody could do the math on the serial latency of USB?

spidey

 

[MustPost]

How can there be a 10/100 adapter when the most USB can give to a device is 12MB/s or is that 12MB/s for all devices combined

 

[acexg1]

That's the thing: USB 10/100 adapters aren't really 10/100. Even running at 10 mbps it is slower than a PCI card running at 10 mbps.

 

[blstriker]

That's what I found to be really misleading. Why do you label something 10/100 when they can't even reach 10? It's really stupid. But it get's sales and people who don't know better get duped.

 

[MustPost]

Yeh, but i mea in test situations a 10/100 PCI adapter can get almost 100. But this is imposible with to be transfered with slow USB

 

[Eug]

Just a note... When I ran multiple high bandwidth USB devices simultaneously in Win 98, I got BSODs. In fact, it was one of the only situations where I could consistently get BSODs. All devices were perfectly fine on their own.

Even if it did work properly with all your USB devices, I don't see the point - PCI is MUCH faster, and a you can get 10/100 cards for $15 nowadays. Hell, USB 10/100 NICs are almost as slow as my wireless NIC (11 Mbps spec, measured in my home at 4.8 Mbps with WEP encryption on). I figure the only reason to go USB is if you're outa slots, or else it's for a laptop or something and you don't have any PCMCIA slots left. (Most people on this site can install a PCI card or PCMCIA card so I don't think installation is an issue.)

However, it does make sense to label a slow USB NIC 10/100 regardless of the slow speed. A pure 10 Mbps card will not work with a pure 100 Mbps network. A 10/100 USB card would work with a pure 100 Mbps network, albeit at much slower speeds.

 

[blstriker]

I don't quite understand what you mean a pure 10 Mbps card won't work on a 100 network? Do you mean that it won't work if the hub/switch doesn't support 10 Mbps? (solely 100 Mbps versus 10/100 Mbps) Almost all networks that run at 100 Mbps also support 10 Mbps.

 

[Eug]

<< Do you mean that it won't work if the hub/switch doesn't support 10 Mbps? (solely 100 Mbps versus 10/100 Mbps) Almost all networks that run at 100 Mbps also support 10 Mbps. >>

Yeah, I'm talking mainly about those 100 Mbps hubs.

 

[doubledc]

thanks everybody. I will go get another network card. I only had the USB in the first place because I didnt want the cable company opening my computer. I will say that for all it's apparent lack of speed my downloads have always been very fast (150 kb/s with download accelerator) and for someone that wants simplicity it was a breeze to set up especialy for a single connection. but Fry's has a 10/100 card right now for $8 so I will go get one.

 

[Eug]

150 Kb/s is only a little around 1.2 Mbps. Even USB is fine for that. USB just sucks on a network 100 Mbps or even 10 Mbps network.

 

[MustPost]

150kb/s isn't fast. that's less then 20 KB/s. On my 640/90 DSL even though I think Verizon changed the speed slightly now, i can get up to 50 or 60 KB/s

 

[HansXP]

USB isn't good for anything with a lot of data transfer involved (hard drives, NICs, etc) because all of that information has to flow though the processor. Basically, it's like PIO instead of DMA. Really dumb. That's why I prefer firewire

 

[FreeFrag]

I have a USB 10Mb adapter on the family computer, It was a life saver for me (damn i hate running outta slots!) but I had the problem If i restarted, the USB NIC wouldn't work; I'd have to turn the computer off and on, or unplug the NIC and plug it back in. It was also slow on my 10Mb network. I'd go for a &quot;real&quot; NIC if you can fit one in