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[oldfogy]

My PC has wireless capabilities along with the normal Ethernet (LAN) connection.
Is there any adverse effect with having both of them connected at the same time?

I know I can only receive up-to my maximum BW on either setup, but could it actually be detrimental and slow down the faster connection (LAN) ?

[Pwiggler]

hi of

you will probably get 'limited or no connectivity' if both are enabled in vista, but if it does connect there will be no slow-down in speed (and no increase    ).

[soms]

In XP, even if the connections are to totally different networks the wireless seems to be prioritised over the ethernet and only one link seems to be used. You can't seem to connect to seperate networks as a client and explore both.

[Pwiggler]

thats right soms, but if had 2 x wlan adaptors in the xp machine then it could connect to 2 seperate networks.

[oldfogy]

A slight difference of opinion then:

>> if it does connect there will be no slow-down in speed

>> the wireless seems to be prioritised over the ethernet

With regards to the "network", I did try moving a 4.5GB file from one PC to the other and with both wireless and LAN connected, turned on and working, the transfer speed was that of my normal LAN connection, about 8 minutes, previously when I tried it with just with the wireless connection it would have taken about 30 minutes.

[Pwiggler]

30 minutes over wireless??  mine takes hours for a dvd size file.  i get 9 - 10 meg wireless connection between my 2 main machines .... whats the transfer rate of yours OF?

if it took 8 mins then the wired lan is prioratised

[oldfogy]

OK I have to show my ignorance here:
(I don't know, it just works, so have never bothered looking into the techie side of things)

How do I find the transfer rate?
On one of the diagnostic settings it said a speed of 100 Mbps

This is only a Internet speed test with the LAN cable disconnected, so it would only use the wireless connection. Not much help I'm afraid.

************************************************

This physical transfer took exactly 26 minutes:

4.18 GB (4,493,455,360 bytes)

So that works out at:

2,880,420 (2.9 MBps)

[Pwiggler]

i use DUMETER from :http://www.hageltech.com/dumeter/download.php

its a tiny app which sit mostly transparent on ya desktop and reports up/download speed.

[guest]

Windows uses what is called a metric to determine which route (connection) to use. Basically Windows will look at a number of factors, of which "link speed" is probably the most important (on a LAN). Then it will assign a metric to each connection and the lowest value "wins", so unless your wireless connection actually offered some sort of routing difference/advantage then Windows will always use the wired connection.

I wouldn't recommend concurrent connections as its entirely possible that the router (assuming most of you now use one) will lose the plot completely because it'll assign two IP addresses to the same machine and what's known as "route flapping" is possible. This is where the router can't decide which route is "best" and sends a chunk of data via one route (wireless for example) then the next via the second route (wired for example) and so on which drastically reduces throughput. Alternatively the router may just not respond at all - a Draytek I once had did just that.

Relative speeds :

100Mbps network will max out at approximately 12MB/sec (that's megabytes, not megabits), which is 1GB in about 80 seconds or a DVD (5GB) in 400 seconds (6.5 minutes or so). That's best case however so I'd be inclined to knock 10-20% off the peak speed for a more realistic figure so assume 10MB/sec as a rule of thumb. Less than that and there is a potential bottleneck/problem somewhere.

802.11g (54Mbps) will max out at approximately 2.25MB/sec (megabytes again), which is 1GB in about 440 seconds (7 minutes+) or a DVD in 2200 seconds (37 minutes or so). Best case again but wireless speeds are heavily dependent on signal strength and also on how many other wireless stations are in range and overlapping your channel. Edit - a rough rule of thumb on encrypted connections is to divide the reported link speed by 25 to get the maximum throughput in megabytes, but even then overlapping wireless stations can reduce that further.

Does that help at all?

[oldfogy]

Yes thanks Rizla.
That more or less confirms the actual transfer speed that occurred.

However I have turned the wireless of as it's not really needed as it's hard wired anyway.
I just wondered if there could have been any detrimental effects.

[kitz]

With the PC and media center I havent bothered de-activating the "other" connection although I usually only ever connect wirelessly with the media center and via ethernet on the PC.

However I use the lappy on occasion with both LAN and wireless activated and I have a strong suspicion that is what caused the problem I had here http://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php?topic=222.0

I just noticed browolf made a comment at the end of that thread which says "there's a setting in windows which determines which network connection has precedence in the event both are plugged in"

[oldfogy]

I don't know if it's the same type of problem, but I have just added to the end of that thread what seems to happen on my network occasionally. (Usually after renaming things)

[kitz]

Thanks OF

I cant recall exactly now - but I know it caused a lot of reading up and hair tearing at the time since nothing would seem to clear it.

But iirc it was something to do with netbios breaking, windows browser service (not IE,FF etc) and my router. which had a few people scratching heads.

[guest]

Probably the TTL of the ARP entries. We had no end of problems with a Zyxel router due to this - the ARP entries took far too long to expire.

[Pwiggler]

the 'route' command in a cmd prompt can change the metrics to give a particular NIC precedence over the other.

if you type 'route' into a prompt it gives a description of the available commands and how to use 'em.