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[Supermercado]

All appeared to be related to the 802.11g wireless card I put in. Not the new 80GB hard drive, thank god for that. I need to mail the rebate for that... Anyway, though, I still don't know exactly why the card caused the problems it did. Maybe someday I'll try putting it in a different PCI slot or something but for now, I'll take slower transfer speeds back and forth between my machines with very little change in my BitTorrent speeds.

[Vengeance]

See? This is what I'm talking about. I have NO clue what the hell you just said. LOL

 

[Supermercado]

I can explain any time you want. It's not that tough once you know the language.

[Catfish]

Maybe someday I'll try putting it in a different PCI slot or something but for now... *snip*

Interestingly enough, base IRQs are often tied to the PCI slot a card is in, so by changing the slot you'll change a DMA range or an IRQ, perhaps resolving a conflict that wasn't really noticed.  It would also depend what resources the NIC was sharing, too... that would have a lot to do with some issues... Interesting the things you think of after the fact :x

[Supermercado]

I thought about that when I was messing with it, but never bothered to try it since it didn't say there were IRQ conflicts as far as I know.

[Catfish]

Well, XP doesn't have the same sort of declaration of IRQ conflicts like 9x did.  9x didn't like two devices on the same IRQ, but XP will tolerate that now.  Thus, you have IRQ sharing.  Well, that still doesn't always work out quite right depending what devices you have on the same IRQ.  Two high-service devices on the same IRQ (like an active NIC and perhaps a sound card) are likely to cause problems overloading an IRQ resulting in nasty behaviors.  So, while XP won't come right out and say it has an IRQ problem, it just might :x  The best thing to look at is device manager, view resources by connection.

[Supermercado]

Now you tell me

At any rate, though, the old card has been in the machine for several days and the only time I had to restart it was when I shut it down to move it from the floor back to its spot in the desk so my sister could use the treadmill. There's been a few instances of the connection speed dropping to 1Mbps but they're not very many and it comes back to 11 with what looks to be between 60% and 70% signal strength. I'm transferring some stuff over the network now at around 480KBps right now instead of the 1300KBps that I got with the 802.11g card, so it's about 3 times slower. I think that's a reasonable trade-off. Performance for stability. I'm not doing anything so mission-critical where 480KBps isn't perfectly sufficient.

[Catfish]

Yeah, a functional, level throughpout of 480 kBps is pretty high... if you work that out, that's about 2 and a half T1 lines... that's, um, good :p

[Supermercado]

That's for my LAN transfers. If I get on a good torrent, I can pull close to 400KBps down. Earthlink must have done some mad service upgrades around here. I'd like to know exactly what our service levels are. I know I can upload at 40KBps, which isn't stellar but it's not terrible, either.

[Catfish]

Yeah, but you have to look at comparison to other services... 400 down is 3 Mbps and 40 up is 384 kbps... those are basically standard cable and DSL rates, so that's about on par (though, I believe cable is now capped at 6 meg down and 384 or 512 up)... can't really beat those speeds with anything that's not a commercial uberexpensive line

[Supermercado]

Whatever exact service we have, I'll take it. They don't seem to have any bandwidth restrictions, either, which is the best part, hehe.