Tuesday, January 13, 2015

My man cave got a small upgrade

After moving to our new house, we don't intend on moving again any time soon at all! So this time around, I decided to make the place fully networked with good old fashioned UTP (unshielded twisted pair, aka network cable if you didn't know). We use a media center PC to do our TV watching on, and this also happens to be the place where my ADSL router is situated (nice and central to give a better wifi coverage).

So, in the living room I have a 5 port gigabit switch, which connects to our study with a network cable through the ceiling. In the study, it connects to an 8 port gigabit switch. In the study there's our work PC's and the NAS. Today, I've decided to take a cable from the study to my man cave through the ceiling as well - it was using an old 54mbps Netgear wifi dongle that I've had for ages, and the thing is just not stable enough for anything other than browsing the internet.

So, now I have my man cave PC also connected with a proper cable onto the network.

One thing I must also say is that if you're still running a 100mbps LAN, do yourself a favour and upgrade to a gigabit one - it makes a huge difference! Copying something over the network is now actually so fast, that my hard drive read and write speeds are the bottleneck! Copying files only utilizes about 50% of my network capacity, which is bloody awesome!

Just remember to wire your cables properly, if they're not, chances are you'll only get 100mbps out of them.

Check out this handy guide on how to wire your network cables properly - it explains it very well indeed!

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